


Harry Potter and the Kitchen Sink

by George_Pushdragon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-06
Updated: 2011-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:26:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 43,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24105139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/George_Pushdragon/pseuds/George_Pushdragon
Summary: A collection of short stories from humour to romance and even some limericks, covering a lot of different ratings, styles and themes. These are all separate stories, posted as chapters because of sheer laziness.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Charlie Weasley, Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy/Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom/Draco Malfoy, Scorpius Malfoy/Harry Potter
Kudos: 8





	1. A fine art to getting away with it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where Draco has been messing with the financial system. (Harry/Draco - for Raitala)

The device in Harry's pocket had been vibrating urgently for some time. Draco opened the window with a lazy word and removed the device, the pocket, and the trousers they were attached to, out onto the lawn. If it was a national emergency, they were bound to have a more direct way to contact him. If not, they would have to wait until Draco was finished with him.

The occasional muffled noise from downstairs said that a good few of the party guests were still making the most of the free-flowing hospitality, under the watchful eye of Draco's small army of house elves. This pleased him, of course. His previous launches had acquired an aura of legend which he had no wish to diminish. Ordinarily, he would have remained among the most entertaining of the late-stayers, overseeing whatever drunken duel or carnal folly the pre-dawn hours drew them into. However, a dramatic exit was always a temptation, and it was hard to get more dramatic than disappearing from a shadowy corner with the Minister for Magical Law Enforcement's cravat in hand.

Harry slept on his front with his arms curled around the pillow; an endearingly boyish trait except that the lean strength of his back and shoulders was unmistakably adult. Draco, who hadn't had the pleasure of this particular view for some time, made sure to appreciate it. 

Last night's chain of events had begun with Harry treating him to a particularly strident lecture on the ethics of appropriating the attributes of magical creatures. It was a good thing he hadn't known about the latest prototype, a flying carpet with the stealth and deadly smother of a Lethifold for the lucrative and gullible military market. His lecture had started as an idle sort of tease over martinis at the reception and become downright earnest following the speeches. Truth be told, Draco found that side of him extremely attractive, now that commerce had replaced ideology completely in his own life. Harry was never lovelier than with the light of passion in his eyes, his glass weaving in his hand as he forgot himself in the heat of argument. Yes, of course Draco had made a study in the art of winding him up. 

His study reaped rich rewards. Mid-tirade, long after the launch itself had wound down and Draco had manoeuvred them both into the shadow of the library door, Harry had put his glass down on a shelf and kissed him. 

He shifted onto his side and stroked the back of Harry's calf with his foot.

"Come here," Harry said without opening his eyes, his voice gravelly and full of promise.

Draco didn't, preferring to watch as Harry rolled onto his back and stretched himself awake, unhurried and at ease.

"A bit presumptuous this morning, Minister. The invitation promised cocktails and fine dining. The rest I think you'll find is entirely discretionary."

"If you like," Harry said equably, and slipped under the sheets to kiss Draco's stomach: those extraordinary, muscular kisses of his that reflected the complete lack of hesitation Harry brought to everything he did. He took his time moving down. 

"Do try to remember you're a guest here-" Draco was saying when the conversation came to an abrupt end. 

The thing about Harry was that his self-control matched Draco's, and he liked to win. It was a long and very pleasant while later that Draco extracted himself from the tangle of limbs they had worked themselves into. 

Stretched out on top of the covers, Harry raised himself on one elbow. "The launch was everything you wanted then?"

He liked that about Harry, too. You could have a decent conversation in the morning while you worked out whether you wanted to keep him around for breakfast. Draco picked up his half-full glass from the table and sipped it, more for the decadence of the gesture than any real thirst.

"A nice bit of froth and bubble. So long as the investors were dazzled, it did its job. The product doesn't need the hype. It will sell itself."

Of this he had no doubt. A healing balm with the cure-all properties of phoenix tears would find its way into every household in the country, and in time the world. Even the most conservative profit predictions featured figures large enough to recede into the abstract. The attraction was no longer the money itself – for some time now, his business had turned over far more than he could ever dream of spending – but the freedom it bought him from interference or challenge. The Manor was an impregnable fortress now, with walls made of a force even greater than marble and magic. 

"What's next?" Harry asked. "I imagine you've got the next big invention in development already."

Draco glanced at him sharply in case his sources had somehow discovered the Lethifold carpet. Draco thought not. In any case, he looked sated enough that he might be prepared to let even that go by in the leisure of morning. 

"I have a few projects in production."

"Anything involving Malaclaws?"

Nakedness made it a little more challenging to disguise an uncomfortable reaction. Draco thought he had succeeded. 

"Not at present."

Harry's smile had danger in it, and Draco liked that too.

"You should look into it. Their bites cause bad luck, you know. Think of the market for that."

"What an inventive mind you have, Minister," Draco said, and decided to keep him around for breakfast after all.

They were out on the lawn, strolling off the effects of duck eggs and streaky bacon and a reckless interlude under the gazebo, when he found out what Harry knew.

"The people from Deutsche Bank seemed happy," Harry said. "It took you a while to get investors on board though. Didn't it?"

Draco straightened the buttons of his coat, correcting the disorder of Potter's embrace, and said sourly, "A little." 

"You must have had a few lenders turn you down." Potter was looking out over the lake, but his playful undertone said his mind was very much engaged. "Who were they?"

"Why don't you tell me?"

"I'd only be guessing."

"Go on then."

From anyone else, this conversation might have struck him as threatening. But in his professional dealings with Harry, regulatory examination had long ago assumed the lilt of flirtation. 

"Let's start with Bear Stearns. Did you approach them for finance?"

"The name sounds faintly familiar."

"Northern Rock?"

"Possibly."

"Merrill Lynch?"

"After a while, it's hard to tell them apart."

"I heard you had negotiations with Lehman Brothers."

"Did you?"

"No, did you?"

Draco smiled the smile he'd been wearing last night when Harry had kissed him. 

"Their particular brand of condescension and rampant posturing is hardly to be described as negotiation."

Of course Harry knew. He had the authority to ascertain the exact quantity of Malaclaw the business had imported, and the dates of each shipment. The only thing that mattered was what he could prove, and on that count, Draco had been extremely careful. 

"And less than a year after turning you down, they were out of business. Pretty bad luck, wouldn't you say?"

Draco said nothing. If he gave anything resembling an admission, Harry might have had to act on it. So long as he stayed silent and quietly vanished the evidence, the supposition could remain nothing more than another delicious source of tension between them. 

"I think you're playing a pretty dangerous game, Draco."

He took the lapels of Harry's coat firmly in hand – good quality wool, well cut, another of the little things he appreciated – and gave himself a moment to appreciate the potential of it. 

"You know what I think, Minister?" he murmured, pulling Harry close enough for their lips to brush. "I think you like it."

There was a fine art to getting away with it. Harry's arms tightened around him. He thought he had just about got the hang of it. 

**


	2. Look Ma, no hands!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> George Weasley leads everyone astray in an x-rated display of wandless magic (mildly Ron/Draco)

Ron Weasley wasn't gay. He'd never had a gay thought in his life – well, maybe one, but surely he wasn't the only bloke to wonder what Hermione would be like with a cock because frankly there was something in her personality that just begged the question. Apart from that, though, no gay thoughts at all, unless you counted listening to Charlie and his Brazilian boyfriend on the other side of the hallway last Christmas and feeling disappointingly certain that he'd never in his life made a noise so bloody abandoned in the whole of his nineteen and a half years.

Ron didn't have a gay bone in his body, and if just at present he happened to have his naked cock out in the company of nine other blokes, that was just part of normal male-male bonding and not questionable in the slightest. It was all George's fault, and George wasn't gay either, everyone said so, especially now that Fred's tragic death had stopped people, for shame, from repeating all of those old rumours and even, for fear of his mother, from circulating the incriminating photographs.

It was George's fault because George was the one who had dragged Harry's stag night prematurely into the gutter.

"Very impressive, little brother," George had slurred, taking the wind abruptly out of Ron's favourite Auror training anecdote, "but could you have cast it _with your cock _?"__

__Silence descended. Intoxicated minds did their best impression of pondering. Intoxicated eyes slunk around the room in guilty contemplation, but the Hog's Head was empty except for Dumbledore, whose sexuality was the topic of rampant speculation and would remain so until someone got close enough to the goat to find out one way or the other._ _

__George's belt buckle clanked. He tossed a beer mug in the air and caught it._ _

__"Ten Galleons says I can levitate it, wand down, hands behind my back."_ _

__George must have had a lot of spare time during quiet afternoons in the shop. A minute later, he pocketed his ninety Galleons._ _

__Neville, supposedly the shy one, stepped forward. "I'll bet you can't light the fire with it."_ _

__That cost him another twenty and (almost) both of his eyebrows._ _

__George was on a roll after that. Only transfiguration was too complex for his skills. He floated and freighted, flew and rotated, ignited and illuminated, he made things sing and spin and go bang, and all of it with the practised point of his prick._ _

__The room was soon full of swinging genitals and straying spells – because if you saw two men naked together you might think they were a bit gay, but if you saw a whole roomful of men naked together, it was obviously just a bit of a laugh. Harry, of course, got the knack of it instantly and was soon levitating beer nuts into a pint glass on the bar on the other side of the room. Neville had an attack of nerves and, dangling uncertainly, turned his own shoe into a pelican. And Ron? Ron got carried away with the warm tingle of magic working itself through him – got so carried away that, before he knew it, he was shooting an extravagant silver fountain of sparks straight up on the ceiling._ _

__And that was when a tiny movement drew his eye to the shadowed doorway that led out to the gents, and to the gawping figure of that insufferable git Malfoy standing paralysed in it._ _

__Since Ron had grown up in a family of (not that he'd compared in a gay sort of way but certain statistical conclusions were inevitable) big-dicked men – no surprise that Bill had nabbed himself a Veela; Charlie's exes called him the uncrowned king of Romania, and Percy was going to be the death of someone if he ever got his end away – he'd never thought of himself as anything more than ordinary. That opinion was remoulded under the pressure of Malfoy's gaze, which hugged the long curve of his shaft as he showed off a little, sketching his name in silver next to the chandelier. As he wound up the last letter, taking a good grip around the base to flourish the loop of the 'y', Malfoy was still watching, with his lips parted just a fraction and a look in his eyes that said "Yes _please_."_ _

__Then he raised his eyes to Ron's and his expression was equally eloquent: this time it said "Wouldn't you like to know?"_ _

__And Ron really did want to know – not least because another one of the gay thoughts he had never had was during that phase when Malfoy had gone to the continent to behave badly, when the Muggle and magical papers alike had obsessed over those grainy photographs of Malfoy on the boat with that married footballer, and quite specifically he'd never had gay thoughts about the shot of Malfoy in his sleek navy blue swimming costume bending right down from the waist to pick up his towel, with the footballer just reaching out touch his lower back in a gesture that implied proprietary rights and a promissory note for more intimate contact later in the privacy of the cabin._ _

__"Wouldn't you like to know?" said the hard swell of Malfoy's upper lip, and Ron's helpless stare must have said yes, yes I would, because five minutes later they were jammed into the end toilet cubicle and Ron's trousers were around his ankles._ _

__Ron wasn't gay but he wasn't an idiot either and, since he had just discovered that the world did not contain a single object silkier or more devoted than Draco Malfoy's mouth, he could not have respected himself for failing to make the most of it._ _

__Malfoy licked his lips and sucked the head of Ron's cock back into his slick red mouth, wrapping himself around the weight and heat of it. Now Malfoy, Malfoy was gay, Ron was almost certain of it. Ron didn't hold it against him, though._ _


	3. The history books forgot about us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bittersweet Harry/Draco post-break-up fic, for Frayach

There is a chandelier as big as a dining table, and Draco is standing underneath it, talking to the Minister for Magic and a woman who Harry thinks must be the chair of the St Mungo's Board. There is something that marks him out as the centre of attention, even though the ceremony has not begun yet. Something about the clusters of guests surrounding him, angled towards him but never approaching too close. Or perhaps it is just the effect of his striking hair and height, and the natural fall of Harry's gaze.

Harry, keeping to the shadows on the balcony in his inappropriate day wear, watches through the panes of the French doors as Draco puts down his glass on a passing tray. Hung on the wall behind him are portraits of discharged patients. Harry finds the one of Alice Longbottom, white haired and frail but fiercely clasping the hand of her son who stands just outside the frame.

He barely moves, but Draco's attention shifts over the Minister's shoulder and, for a fraction of a second, fastens on him. Harry watches him slowly peel himself away from the conversation, accepting the Minister's effusive handshake as he turns toward the balcony, fending off the overtures of other guests with an efficient nod.

Outside, the gloss of over-abundant light slips off, so that Draco looks familiar again.

"I would have got you an invitation, you know."

Draco eases the door closed and checks with a glance that no-one has followed.

"I only just arrived," Harry tells him. "Didn't want to make a scene."

"You wanted to creep in without having to talk to anyone."

Harry shrugs. It's not as if he hasn't gone to some lengths in pursuit of solitude.

Outside the rectangle of light falling from the hall, the balcony recedes into darkness unlit by any moon. Draco steps into it, rests his elbows over the damp balustrade.

"How's Valparaiso?"

Harry leans back beside him, watching the colour and movement on the other side of the glass.

"I'm in Havana now. It's full of rum cocktails and fit young men reared on salsa dancing. You'd hate it."

When Draco smiles, the lines around his mouth run deeper than they used to. His smile, too, is a less precarious gesture, as if indicating a contentment he no longer expects to lose.

"Well my tastes always were quite specific."

Harry tilts his head back, towards the empty sky, away from the neat angle of Draco's hips where he bends.

He says, "And you?"

"We're fine." In a long black dress at the side of the podium, Harry can make out the other half of that softly spoken plural. "Doing well. As well as can be expected."

The voices inside seem distant, quieter than the splash of the fountain in the courtyard below, as if the glass panes had made a veil between one place and another. 

"Hey, congratulations," Harry says, a little loud. "It's about time they recognised everything you've done."

The line of Draco's mouth is not as happy as it ought to be.

"You should have seen what the Prophet said."

"That you'd paid your debts now? I saw it. They were wrong."

Draco doesn't contradict him, but he goes very still and keeps his attention pointedly on the fountain, tense shadows under his cheekbones.

"You did that a long time ago."

"Yes," says Draco, eventually. "So you always said."

Draco looks over his shoulder, to where a few of the guests have started to move towards the far end of the hall, and straightens. Harry rushes on.

"I wanted to make sure you know. That if it could have-" He searches around for a way to put it that gives the past its due, without saying too much. "I'd be honoured. If I was the one standing up there beside you."

The blank look Draco gives him makes him shove his hands in his pockets, squeezing the stub of his boarding pass like a portkey to his other life, the life he has chosen. Inside, the sound of voices starts to die down.

"Idiot," Draco says, easy and low.

He unfastens his cuff and bares his wrist to reveal the scar, now pale, that runs around his forearm in a curve so even it could be a tattoo.

And all of a sudden he is eighteen again, the Wizengamot summons in panicked ashes in the corner of his room, looking at Harry as if he isn't sure whether he wants to burn the whole world to the ground or throw himself out a window. 

Harry puts his finger lightly on the very end of the scar, where the drawn skin tapers away and history turns back into living flesh. Draco lets him leave it there, both of them lingering. The scar is from a few short days before Draco's hearing, before anything had happened between them but after it had become clear that something was going to, when Harry had put them on a train to Snowdonia and marched them both up the side of the mountain until Draco had been too busy trying to outpace him to dwell on thoughts of the future. The way he'd looked at the summit, just before the fall and the broken-off branch that had made the scar – the way he'd looked, pink cheeked and viciously alive, wearing a blazing sort of smile that Harry had never seen on him before – that was when Harry had made up his mind not to wait for things to take their course.

"I can't believe you haven't got rid of it," Harry murmurs.

The scar disappears as Draco folds his sleeve back into place. Harry recalls the tight bandage wrapped around the wound; how it had scratched over his shoulder, over his back, in the rented room with the second bed unslept in. How the gash had stayed livid for months, no matter how many times Harry re-bound it, sitting in the strong morning light by the bedroom window, taking all the time in the world.

"Can't you?"

Six years is a long time, Harry thinks. But so is one month, two years, twenty, fifty. Time is just a distance between two things. Pond or lake or ocean, on either side is still a shore, joined by water one to the other. Time has to move, but whether they let it move them apart is a matter of choice.

Harry kisses him, chaste, on the cheek. They are almost of a height; they would fit together all too easily if either of them cared to trade the bounty of the present for a past they have lived once, and lived well, and let go of. 

"Don't stay away so long," Draco tells him, squeezing his shoulder long enough to make the point. 

He pulls the door closed behind him.

The night is warm. Harry leans against the wall by the door, shrouded in darkness, and listens to the applause. He keeps on listening, eyes closed, until the sound has faded away entirely. Because a little bit of it – unmeasurable, imperceptible – is his, and always will be. 

**


	4. The boy with the world at his feet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuck in an endless round of cocktail parties, Harry thinks about Malfoy, tracking nundu in distant jungles. (pre-Harry/Draco)

The world narrowed to a glimmer. A caged star, hanging in the shelter of Mrs Dyer's sleek blond hair. Her earring swung and trembled and glittered as she inclined her head towards him. 

"Don't you think, Harry?"

For a lop-sided moment, the light-struck diamonds seemed to be the only real things in the room, and all the rest no more than a hallucination, from the quietly clinking cutlery to the hovering candles, the house-elves attentive in the shadows, the shells of butter slowly melting. He thought of the jewels' origins, buried under unthinkable tons of mud, rough-edged, unlit for thousands of years before being dragged into the open air to dangle from a sealed hole in Mrs Dyer's skin. He wondered where they had come from, whether they had travelled by ocean or by air, in a crate or in a velvet-lined case. How many hands had balanced the stones in a covetous palm and contemplated theft? Would the gem-smith who had cut them recognise the workmanship now?

"Harry."

Others had turned at the change in Mrs Dyer's tone. How absurd that he should have to give up the diamonds to return to small talk with people he barely knew, and lobster ravioli that barely registered in his mouth.

Mrs Dyer's lips were so well charmed that even after three courses they resembled two plump crimson pillows, sleek as satin. For one despairing moment, he lost track of himself altogether. Which of the dozens of worthy causes was tonight's event in aid of? War orphans? School building? The Lupin scholarship? Displaced giants? No sooner was one source of disadvantage identified than a greater one appeared, all the more deplorable for having been neglected. 

"Yes," Harry said. "Of course." 

He had long since discovered that, in the presence of potential donors whose contribution could double a programme's capacity, he could say 'Yes, of course' to a very great number of things. Most likely he had not just agreed to anything that would embarrass him later. Mrs Dyer was the sort of benefactress who required very little recompense, except to be made a fuss of in a public forum so as to save her and her husband the indignity of having to make their very large charitable contributions known to the world. To his gratitude, she was not political, not one of those who thought their Galleons bought them the right to impose their own agenda. 

"Did you enjoy the ceremony on Sunday?" enquired the man opposite him. Bow-tied with a thick middle-aged neck, he was probably somebody's Muggle father or uncle, but the fact that Harry had no idea of his name meant that he was obviously only a middle-range donor. 

"I'm afraid I couldn't be there. I had a board meeting." 

How easily the lies came to his tongue when they were necessary for a higher cause. Days were just the names of dead gods – the short bursts of light that came between the torture of the bathroom mirror and the razor, and the last stagger, half-undressed, into bed. Sunday could have been the tailor's appointment before the evening's West End premiere, or the entire afternoon he spent sitting on his kitchen floor with a bottle, a glass and a three year old copy of the Quibbler, flicking its pages unseeingly back and forward until the light had faded. 

The conversation stilted. Mrs Dyer leaned back from the table, making her beautiful jewels turn dull. 

He had no idea how he had come to this point. Perhaps it was a dream after all.

Later, when he was cornered in the foyer making his way through the queue of lingering guests who would not leave until they'd had their purchased chance to talk to him one-on-one, the drink finally began to make the conversation comfortably blurred. He contributed no more than the occasional nod to the brusque lecture Anthony Goldstein's brother was giving him about giant labour in the building industry. From time to time, he slid his hand into the pocket that his tailor had warned him would spoil the careful line of the formal robes, and flicked at the catch of his wallet. Open, closed. Open, closed. 

"I'm better at doing things than talking about them," he replied to repel the predictable question of why he had turned down a seat in the Wizengamot, and looked around for a house-elf to re-fill his glass, and ran his thumb slowly over the worn, welcoming edges of the leather.

When he got back to his apartment, if he turned the lights off, he could have a long glass of absinthe and aconite on the sofa, with all his clothes thrown off in the hallway and the open windows making his limbs ache with the late autumn cold. 

"Bless you, Harry Potter," said an elderly man in distantly familiar purple robes, his voice low and emotional as he clasped Harry's hand warmly in both of his, and Harry graced him with the only smile he had left in him – the one that kept the money coming in.

In his wallet was a sketch map showing towns he couldn't pronounce, somewhere in the Congo, with one of the names underlined and an address scrawled beside it. He'd got it the summer before last, when Malfoy had come back to London for some funeral or other – possibly Goyle's – and spent his last night at an exhibition Hermione had put on as a fund-raiser for the new Severus Snape Potions Collection. Around the bar table afterwards, Harry had asked for Malfoy's address up front, just for the idle entertainment of showing everyone how easily he could get it. It was common knowledge that Malfoy was queer – he'd lived with a Quidditch writer in Edinburgh for a year before he'd gone abroad.

"Why not?" Harry had said between casual swigs of beer. "Someone's got to make sure he's not doing anything he shouldn't be." 

In the predictable laughter, Malfoy hadn't even put up a fight. He'd just taken the Weasleys Wizarding Emporium card Harry passed him, marked the back of it in definite, abrupt strokes, and returned it with his free hand already lifting his coat from the chair beside him. 

The floral burst of Mrs Dyer's perfume over his shoulder signalled that the evening was almost finished. He had to rally once more, for her – the largest contributor and the evening's hostess – and then he could creep off into solitude. 

"The best dinner yet," he said, wielding that smile one last time, aiming for the hint of intimacy that was so crucial to her goodwill. "At least five people have said so – I lost count of them."

She let the house-elves settle the fur trim of her travelling cloak around her shoulders. 

There was no doubt that Malfoy remained unreconciled to the new Britain. On the far side of the equator, he tracked Nundu into their deepest jungle haunts, teasing out the secrets of their deadly stealth for purposes that could only be malign, and sent back the occasional essay on African magic, full of anti-Muggle undertones that restricted publication to one or two journals that Harry despised. He'd said little at the exhibition, and still less as the last visitors drifted into the bar for drinks, merely stalked in like a returned conquistador with a mind full of uncommunicable wonders, scrutinised a few of the more obscure paintings with unmerited fascination, and slipped off into the early morning darkness with his last drink unfinished and his address in Harry's pocket. 

"And how did you find it? You seemed a little out of sorts tonight."

If her glistening lips eased into a smile, there was no softening the command that lay behind it.

"Wonderful, Marita." He stepped behind her to straighten the cloak, his fingers absorbed in the lush fur. From its single silver shoulder strap, her black dress adhered magically to the hard swell of her flesh, clinging as low as it could modestly go. The glittery silver made him think of stars again, in a high black sky, from a brooms-eye view, with a fat river passing far beneath. An unthinkable distance away, and impossible to imagine with his nose full of the domestic smell of perfume. "Tonight was everything we hoped for." His smile nearly faltered. "We'd be lost without you."

The floors were being mopped behind them as they descended the front steps together. He kissed her cheek and helped her up into her carriage. Beyond the building's spell protection, the rain was still falling, and he thought it was a good night to apparate as far as Richmond and walk the last few miles. He wondered if Malfoy was working tonight, creeping through the thick vines, armed with wand and knife and his knotted unicorn hair bracelet glowing soft white for safety.

One black glove resting on the bottom of the open carriage window, Mrs Dyer was waiting for his full attention.

She said, "Shall I take you home?"

If he traded every hour of his day for the sake of donations, why hold anything back? It had been years since he'd known a line as final as a chasm dividing what he was from what he wasn't prepared to do. Possibly he had nothing left worth anchoring his pride to. 

He returned his hand to his pocket, where the catch of his wallet was already open. His finger sought out the tattered border of the old card and rubbed it. 

"No, thank you. I'm afraid I have a board meeting tomorrow."

The last flash of her diamonds vanished into the carriage's dark interior. With an indignant clatter, the carriage itself departed. 

The magic in central Africa was the very darkest, fed off blood and death and musical incantations that had been lost on wizardry's long journey up to Europe. Harry walked with the rain soaking into his boots and trickling into his eyes. The older he got, the more he found that dark and light started to blur into one big, stifling shadow. 

Malfoy's card was damp and smudged by the time he propped it up on his mantelpiece. 

**


	5. Limericks in questionable taste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What it says in the title

Quoth Ron: "Look, don't cry. I'll explain.  
It isn't your smell, or the pain."  
The Squid hung its head.  
"I'm sorry," Ron said,  
"But I hoped you'd feel more like a brain." 

*

Twas Griphook the goblin - or was it? -  
Who bustled him into the closet,  
Growling: "Lucius, you know  
When we've drawn down your loan  
Then it's our turn to make a deposit."

*

A Centaur who taught Divination  
Had quirks in his carnal relations.  
He liked a stiff crop  
From a rider on top  
And a starting gun gave him inflation.

*

When asked about amatory skills,  
Minerva occasionally spills:  
"In matters erotic  
I like them aquatic.  
Those mermaids, they breathe through their gills."

*

A certain professor of potions  
Had, Poppy considered, queer notions.  
"You fell on this flask -  
That's how it stuck fast?  
Well, you'll just have to go through the motions."

*

The curse of a surname like Malfoy  
Was that it was not remotely made to fit  
Plebeian verse forms  
Like the limerick  
And didn't rhyme with "Worship me!" as it should.

*

A dark lord of no fixed abode  
Hatched a Basilisk under a toad.  
Cried he: "Breeding's great!  
Now for my perfect mate -"  
The traumatised toad hit the road.

*

A werewolf/retired Dark Arts teacher  
Made mercy his uppermost feature,  
For man as for beast.  
Well, in theory at least.  
"Not the broomstick! You'll kill me!" howled Kreacher.

*

Hagrid wept as the cutlery clinked:  
"He's gone, vanished, scarpered, extinct!  
Oh, my cuddly Squid!  
And I'm having his kid!"  
"This is good calamari," Filch winked.

*

Albus floo'ed out from Nantucket.  
Best trip of his life, had to chuck it.  
His brother again.  
This time with a hen.  
An ordinary man would just pluck it.

_from a suggestion by rfachir_

*

His scream filled the kitchens. Sobbed Goyle:  
"Ow! Stop! I'm your bitch, man. I'm loyal.  
But find lube or I'll die!"  
Draco glanced around, sly:  
"Avocado has natural oil."

_from a suggestion by tboy_


	6. Dirty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry/Draco on the vexed question of housework

The trouble is, Harry bluntly refuses to have house-elves and Malfoy even more bluntly refuses to sully his pureblood hands with housework. The three storeys of Harry's townhouse are insufficient to accommodate the entirety of Draco's wardrobe discarded by the week's end on the bedroom floor or in whichever of the other rooms Harry happened to undress him. 

Since in childhood Harry had never had any opportunity to negotiate the terms of his daily life, and Draco had the slightest need to, neither possesses the diplomatic tools for resolving this fundamental conflict. But Harry is a lateral thinker, and when it comes to Draco his thoughts tend to run in the same direction. Consequently, it is he who arrives at the idea that Draco's performance of household chores might be rewarded by Harry's performance of sexual favours. Draco refuses in the most insulted of terms. Harry draws up a chart of chores and proportional rewards and makes it as luridly detailed as he can. This time, Draco gives him a disdainful snort, followed by what Harry interprets as an acquiescent silence. 

Days go by with no discernable change. Then on a Friday, Harry returns from work to a jaw-dropping transformation. The kitchen floor is sparkling. The lounge-room furniture is freshly dusted and perfectly arranged. The lustre has come back into the marble fireplace with not a speck of ash to be seen. The haphazard books in the bookshelf have been rearranged into regimental order. Even the doorhandle gleams. 

Reclining on the sofa with a glass of burgundy and the smuggest smile that has ever graced human lips, Draco watches intently as Harry starts on the buttons of his shirt.


	7. The wager

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlie and Lucius make an interesting wager.

The two glass bowls on the bar were already almost full. 

"Remus Lupin." One more ruby tinkled into Charlie's bowl. 

"Fenrir Greyback." Another emerald appeared. "Twice."

"A merman in the Hogwarts lake."

"Three vampires in a crypt."

"Minister Longbottom."

Malfoy sighed idly. "The Ministers for Magic of Portugal, Italy, Kenya, Chile, Colombia and Martinique." Emeralds tumbled. "Or was it Guadeloup?"

"Okay. Both of the Cannons' Beaters."

"Ballycastle's new Seeker."

_"Harry?"_

"Discipline fetish." One sleek white eyebrow arched. "You didn't know?"

Charlie hadn't.

"Well then, Weasley. I believe that settles the wager. My room?" 

One last emerald clinked into his bowl.


	8. Emerald

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Draco makes a good vampire (Harry/Draco - for lusiology)

Draco was in one of his towering tempers. These days, embracing the full aura of his new condition, he had got towering down to a deadly art.

"You have one warning. If it happens again, I'll kill him."

There was no humour there. Framed by the stiff black cape and the black robes that owed their perfect fit to the fact that his body would never alter by another millimetre, Draco's face was pale and severe. Harry was trying to deflect his unpredictable anger in the only way he'd discovered: unflappable equanimity.

"If I ever make a move on Charlie, you can take my head off instead. He's not my type."

Draco's black-rimmed eyes didn't soften.

"I'm not waiting for the inevitable act of fornication. Huddling away in a dark corner is close enough. You crossed a line last night."

Harry let him have the long silence as he walked the width of the library to tug on the heavy velvet curtains and eliminate a sliver of fading sunlight. The change had worn away the last tremors of Draco's youth. He belonged to the Manor now, and it belonged indubitably to him. 

"You want to know what I was talking to Charlie about?" Harry said finally. 

"It makes no difference."

"His mate's the deputy editor of Quidditch Weekly. I'm going to write a column for them. And Cuffe at the Prophet is pretty keen too."

"Oh bravo," came the instant rebuff. "And now a famous author too."

"It's night work, you twit. I'm retiring from the game."

Draco went quiet for a moment, not looking up from some apparently fascinating mark on his left hand. 

"I suppose it leaves your evenings free for chasing arse."

"Yeah. Yours. Now stop sulking and get it over here."

One moment Draco was leaning by the window, nonplussed, tilting his emerald ring idly into the torchlight. The next he had Harry shoved up against the far wall, wrists pinned, blood racing, breath knocked out of him, instantly needy. Only from this close could Harry catch the light in those silvery irises that confirmed he was still more than wholly alive. 

Harry leaned forward and touched the tip of his tongue to one very sharp fang point. "No teeth tonight, yeah? Take it slowly."

With a snort of disdain, Draco trailed his lips lazily up Harry's jaw. "What do you want?" he sneered. "A vampire or a fluffy kitten?"

Harry arched out from the wall and into that first delicious moment of clashing arousals. 

"Tonight, a kitten. Tomorrow, as rough as you like. I'll put up a good fight before I let you take me."

A low laugh vibrated in his ear. "Meow," Draco murmured as he brought their mouths together. 

**


	9. The Spanish Wizarding Armada

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ridiculous Harry/Draco crackfic for Pingrid

Four hundred and eighth day of captivity. Breakfast of strawberries and champagne. Again. Lunch of oysters and champagne. Again. Rostered on oars with bloody half-naked bloody toned bloody consta  
ntly horny bloody blowjobs like a bloody limpet Draco bloody bloody bloody Malfoy. Again. 

Today was not a good day for advancing the resistance.

Hermione said that El Voldemorte and the Spaniards are working us extra hard because they need maximum power to get to Astrakhan before the Russians have time to work out a treaty with the Eastern wizarding leaders. If Russia falls, they'll have four thousand more wizards and witches to work their ships, and with all that magic channelled into sexual energy and poured into their fleet, they'll be damn near-. She disappeared between Padma's thighs at that point but I'm pretty sure the last word was "unstoppable".

I'll stop them if it's the last thing I do. 

Today, while Malfoy was riding me slow and deep, one hand chained to the oar and the other holding my jaw still, I worked out another plan to escape. It was on the verge of coming togther when Malfoy decided it was a good moment to kiss me - bloody hell, that teasing, tip-of-the-tongue way he has, it feels dirtier and more personal than the actual fucking - and by the time he'd pretty much sucked my tonsils out and brought both of us off, I could hardly remember my own name. 

Ron's going to be the one to come up with a plan. There's no better motivator than being stuck on oars with McLaggen three weeks in a row. Today, as we were marched back to our cells for the evening, good old Ron, he slipped something cold and metallic into my hand - the one that wasn't cuffed to Malfoy, of course. "Use it tonight," he hissed at me, "I'll be ready." And as I curled my fingers around it since neither Malfoy nor I had a stitch of clothing to hide it in, for half a second I could see myself getting free. 

But just right then Malfoy dropped his lube tube and why the bloody hell can't he bend at the knees like any normal bloke? What sort of preening twat has to bend right over at the waist to make his legs look five feet long and his arse curve open like a ripe peach? And how did he learn to look up over his shoulder and say my name with that special purr in it - making like he's telling me off but really just winding me up to give him a good hard slamming the moment the cell door is shut?

Thinking about it made the metal thing slip out of my hand. As it jangled away down one of the hatches, I thought it looked like a key.

"Come on, Potter," Malfoy said to me, eyes glinting just like the key as they followed its path. "Buck up, won't you. Dinner is guacamole and a jar of chocolate body paint. On the bright side, if I spend enough hours sucking you off, one day I'll be strong enough to overpower the guards using nothing more than my mouth."

That was a good plan. Unlike Ron's. Malfoy and I spent all night working on it. 

Four hundred and ninth day of captivity. Breakfast of strawberries and champagne. Again.


	10. A particularly bratty year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry/Draco with polyjuice - for twisted_miracle

Presumably Draco's investments had magnified several-fold during the week because Harry's Saturday afternoon visit saw him lounging in the Manor's library with a newspaper, a glass of champagne, and an expression that was smug even by his previously high benchmarks.

"Potter," he said vaguely, returning to his paper.

Harry hated him like this, airy and dismissive as if Harry were someone he paid to come round and fuck him on the odd weekends when his import business didn't take him to the continent. As if he'd forgotten that Harry was leaving on Monday for a six-week assignment studying Lethifolds in Uganda. 

"I've got something you'll like," Harry said.

Draco's expression said he doubted that. What Draco liked was high mark-up luxury goods and a sex life sufficiently scandalous to be constantly talked about and never, ever printed – and after four months, there was precious little scandal left to be wrung out of Harry. "Oh yes?"

Seeing it didn't improve Draco's mood.

"Polyjuice," Harry said to his put-out expression. "What? It could be fun."

"Frankly, Potter, if you want to fuck someone else, you should fuck them. Bring them here if it turns you on. Or elsewhere."

He made such a show of nonchalance sometimes that Harry actually found himself heartened.

"You don't-"

Draco never did. And there was no point in putting it in words, which Draco had learned from the cradle how to twist around and shoot back at him.

From the far wall, Harry drew down one of the albums that Draco had mentioned off-handedly some weeks or months ago. He was sure that Draco had said ...

He didn't see Draco move, just felt the sudden breath hot in his ear. "Oh, Potter," he sighed. "You beautiful little deviant."

In the front of the album, locks of white hair, marked in Narcissa's hand, year by year. Harry chose the one that said 14. "A particularly bratty year, as I remember."

Draco didn't bother defending himself. He kissed Harry's ear clumsily, grabbed both the hair and the potion, and disappeared. 

A few minutes later, Harry had to sit down hard against the desk. He was Draco Malfoy in time-capsule perfection, right down to the side-parted hair and the glossy black shoes. The Slytherin tie had about a dozen uses that had never occurred to Harry at school. But his skin – had it really looked so delicate at fourteen? Had his wrists looked so fragile?

Underneath the perfectly pressed uniform and the bony limbs, however, was the Draco he remembered. All tender thoughts vanished when the sneer kicked in. 

"Professor Potter," Draco said, his younger voice ringing with the unfounded superiority that had grated through six years of school. "Headmaster sent me to see you. Apparently he thinks I ought to apologise for giving that Mudblood idiot the thrashing he deserved. I laughed in his face. We all know there's nothing you can do to make me." 

Draco's eyes glittered. 

Harry's fist closed around the ruler.

"Come here, Malfoy."


	11. An uncommon ambition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scorpius Malfoy needs Harry's permission. (Gen)

He was reserved where his father had been rash, circumspect where his father had been a zealot, and subtle where his father had always seized the bluntest weapon at hand. Even two decades past his defeat, it only took a few drinks to let the same old stream of prejudices and grievances out of Draco's mouth. But the younger Malfoy, if he had either, kept them well and truly hidden. 

"What exactly is the Ministry's objection?" Scorpius Malfoy had just asked, typically economical with his words.

He was a few months out of school. Harry should have been able to rattle him. But he occupied the visitor's chair in Harry's office as comfortably as if he'd been brought up at a board-room table. 

"It isn't the Ministry's objection, Scorpius. It's mine. Like I said, this is a very unusual application and I just don't think it's genuine."

There was a weary sort of patience in Scorpius's silence, as if he were waiting for the Minister for Enforcement to catch up with him.

"Tell me then," Harry tried a different angle. "How many Muggles have you met?"

The question, if a little direct, would not have been unexpected. "More than you might think. One of the boys in my dorm was Muggle-born. I went to stay with his family over the holidays, once. And I go into the city often enough." 

"How do you think you'll get along with a whole academy of them?"

For the first time in their interview, Scorpius dropped his forthright gaze. Behind his youthful over-confidence, he evidently did not need Harry to point out that he was slightly built, with an aloof sort of self-possession that was not going to endear him to young men and women who were being trained to think and work as a pack. His deportment, faintly mannered and foppish even by wizarding standards, would make him an obvious target.

"I'll work hard to win them over. I'll be smart about it. And if I can't, I'll learn to defend myself." He looked like he was steeling himself. "Without magic."

Harry had a fleeting vision of a different timeline, where Hogwarts had never happened and Harry had spent all the years up to adulthood in the constant threat of Dudley's cruelty. At seventeen, the stakes just got higher, the damage worse, and the methods more brutal.

"It's only a matter of training," Scorpius said, with a down-to-the-bone stubbornness that was certainly familiar. 

"What does your father think about this ambition of yours?"

"Not much."

That brusque answer flew in the face of his previous courtesy. There was more, Harry could sense it. "And your grandfather?"

There. That was the lever Harry had spent twenty minutes searching out. The poise went out of the young man's frame, leaving his fingers taut and pressed hard into Harry's desk. Harry watched his shudder turn into very deliberate stiffness. 

He said quietly, "Is that relevant to my application, sir?"

So he was doing this over the formidable opposition of Lucius, as well as his father's notorious inflexibility. Shunning the ancient tradition of the broomstick, he wanted to chase the unlikely dream of piloting aeroplanes. And, against all expectations, Harry couldn't be sure that he wouldn't succeed.

"All right." He leafed through the fine print of the Ministry of Defence forms, giving himself a moment to reconsider the hasty conclusion he had reached. "All right. I'll get you the paperwork you need. But I think you'll find this even harder than you imagine."

As he had throughout the interview, the young man listened thoughtfully.

"Do you think that's a reason to give up on it?"

There was soft emphasis on the word _you_. Who, Harry wondered, did Scorpius Malfoy have to reassure him in the moments when he felt dwarfed by the task he had set himself?

"No. I don't." 

"Thank you, sir."

His errand concluded, Scorpius stood to take his leave. Once he had bundled his papers back together, he fastened them with an unexpected black plastic clip. Conscious, as his family always had been, of the importance of little symbols. 

"Scorpius." His guest turned back politely. Harry found himself looking for something more than mere deference. "Are you going back to Wiltshire? Do you need somewhere – somewhere neutral to stay? Until you go to the academy."

This young man was a puzzle. Like his grandfather, his emotions were unreadable. But that was not, Harry fancied, because he had none to feel. 

"If you're asking me officially, I'd say it's none of the Ministry's business." Unhurriedly, he took a card out of his robes and propped it up on the bookshelf by Harry's door. "But if you're asking personally, I'd say you could buy me a drink and see where it goes from there."

For the first time, he smiled. By the time Harry could think of a response, he was alone. 

Scorpius Malfoy, the card read, gold copperplate on ivory. Apprentice Airman. 

Harry slipped it into his pocket.


	12. Last drinks in the underworld

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scorpius Malfoy doesn't ask for permission. (Harry/Scorpius)

Astonishment rippled back from the door in a slow tide of silence. 

"Another glass?" Harry asked, not even bothering to look over his shoulder at the cause of the disruption. After all, if it was drama he'd been after, he'd have gone down to Wandz, where the lights never stopped swirling over the gyrating young wizards using every new trick of their generation to hook the tastiest catch in the small pond. 

"Gillywater, if you don't mind," replied Xenophilius, who did indulge in a curious glance. 

Harry, who had come to all this rather late, rarely set foot in Wandz. He preferred it here at Gaveston's, where the light was muted and brash attention seeking was frowned upon. Here, the sexual preference of the late afternoon clientele was common knowledge only because of the club's ancient unspoken convention. The staid dress standards, the polished brass, mahogany fittings and low hanging paper lanterns, all suggested nothing more than the comfortable maturity of the club's members. After a long struggle with his conscience, Harry had sworn not to let his celebrity stop him from being who and what he was – but he was too old to flaunt his sexuality, whichever way it happened to bend. 

"Oh dear."

The previously inconspicuous piano broke off half-way through a bar. This time, Harry looked. 

"Took a wrong turn, did you son?" Kirley Duke caught up his martini glass from the top of the piano and swung his long legs over the stool so he could lean back nonchalantly against the keys.

Harry did not dare to hope that might be true.

Irrepressibly friendly, and curious, and currently between boyfriends, Charlie slipped out from the shadows of the corner booth.

"I think you've found what you were looking for," he said and he spread out his arms. 

He received a flatteringly lengthy examination before the verdict, "I'm afraid not."

Scorpius Malfoy surveyed the room, peering into its dark niches and giving no acknowledgement to the fuss his entrance had caused. Charlie's eyes clung to his bottom as he turned. Why wouldn't they? The young man was got up in a pair of cloud- grey trousers so fine and tight that the merest shift in his weight made them quiver with the flex of muscle beneath. The loose drawstring of his white shirt left a good part of his upper chest exposed, and its fine weave fabric required only the gentlest of light to reveal the rest. From the black velvet choker that clasped his throat hung a single teardrop shaped red gem, and as Harry's attention ascended, he parted glistening lips.

Harry turned back to his empty glass, reminded guiltily of the incident after his son's sixteenth birthday dinner, which he had dealt with rather less diplomatically than he would, in full sobriety and without the impediment of shock, have preferred.

"The real beauty of a private club," observed Tiberius Ogden volubly to his neighbour at the bar, "is mostly in what is kept out."

"My guest." Charlie applied his usual amiable obstinacy. "He'll have a double firewhisky on me."

From far too close by came Scorpius's reply. "I said no thank you,"

The click of boot heels approached and stopped. Xenophilius's eyebrows went up. A firm hand gripped Harry's shoulder. Then in one lithe move, Scorpius Malfoy had swung himself astride Harry's legs and sat down, wedging himself between Harry and the table in a squeeze that should not have been physically possible. Harry's first impression was of fast-blinking eyes and a hurtling pulse. 

But Scorpius merely purred, "A man like you, Harry Potter, shouldn't be going home alone night after night," and wrapped his arms around Harry's neck in a grip that looked languid but felt like a wrestler's death-grip tenacity. 

Harry had thought all of this was dealt with. After the worst years of his faltering marriage, he had carefully streamlined his life into something simple and painless. Everyone knew that he was out of the game. His teenaged passion was long spent, and he had come to appreciate the virtues of solitude.

"Hello Scorpius. I thought I'd explained to you-"

"That I'm too young? Well, not as of yesterday." He would not have been able to pass the age lines on the staircase if that had not been true. 

"That's only one reason."

"You're married. Well, I read the Prophet. I join the dots. You wouldn't be here if that really meant anything."

"Scorpius-"

"And you're still old enough to be my father. So what? I want to go to bed with a man."

An armful of lean muscle, he flexed forward to brush his lips over Harry's ear, and behind him, Charlie gave a low, approving whistle. 

He whispered, "Look me in the eye, Harry, and tell me I don't know exactly what I'm doing."

He smelled of clean, young skin, with a whiff of firewhisky on his breath. In the punishing grip of his knees, Harry could feel the anxiety that lay beneath the smooth Malfoy front. The young man didn't know as much as he pretended, but that just made his bluster all the fiercer and his pride all the more unstoppable. 

"Scorpius-" he said.

His tightly clad thigh muscles flexed under Harry's hand belligerently. 

Tiberius Ogden's pointed cough said that some things belonged in Wandz and ought to stay there. Even Aberforth was draining his glass as if the bright lights of closing time had just come on. As Scorpius leaned back, his pout hardening in the hostile atmosphere, the light shone through the fine weave of his shirt. It did a poor job of concealment. 

It had taken Neville into his thirties to really be at ease with himself, and only the unfailing adoration of his children had settled Ron for good. Some men, like Percy, would always bear the imprint of the things that had happened to them in their youth, like the worn stamp of a table's foot on a rug. Solitary Dumbledore had known how a child could be shaped by the world he was born to, but had never really grasped the subtle influence that took the mere inevitability of age and turned it into manhood. Scorpius had come here alone, all desperate theatre and frustrated entitlement. He was no more than eighteen. His inheritance was competent magic and two generations of bitterly thwarted ambition. So many different things could be made of him.

Oh, he could take Scorpius Malfoy into his bed easily enough, and kick him out again once he'd drained the pleasure out of him. Everything about the way he dressed and the way he writhed on Harry's lap said so. But, in reality, Scorpius was neither as pretty nor as pliant as he appeared, and he needed a great deal more than a lover. 

"Scorpius-"

The name felt better and better on his tongue. No longer foreign, it was a word that whispered soft and sweet between his teeth. There would be a price for this affair. After the first night, nothing about it would be easy. But Harry, who had spent long decades denying himself in search of a domestic dream that turned out to be as illusory as a rainbow's end, felt the toll of all his responsible choices. He would never be sixteen and curious, with another boy's hot mouth on his neck and a reckless hand in his trousers. He would never be twenty eight, meeting a stranger's eyes in the lift and knowing that three minutes later they could be up against the back of his office door. He would never be thirty-five, waking up with a strong pair of arms around him and a deep murmur in his ear.

It was as if each relinquishment had required him to cast down deeper and deeper into the well of self-discipline, and this time the bucket had come up wholly dry. Harry's fingertip touched the edge of the young man's jaw, skimmed down to circle the smudge of pink nipple that showed through the fabric. 

"Kiss me."

Scorpius's mouth drew tight, as if permission was the last thing he had expected. His brash gaze faltered. He unwound himself from Harry and stepped away.

"However you like," he said, leaning down to make his soft tone reach Harry's ears. "But not here."

Not long afterwards, under the cool streetlight that filtered through the window of Harry's apartment, Scorpius stretched out in his dandyish finery on Harry's tartan duvet, watched Harry's hand slipping up under his shirt, and delivered his promise. 

"I trust I won't have to put on a show like this every time I want to get your attention," he said in something between a sneer and a pout as Harry's mouth sucked its way down his neck.

As if courting controversy weren’t an integral part of his nature. Yes, Scorpius Malfoy certainly came with a price. A little conflict, however, might be good for them both. Perhaps Harry had got just a bit too comfortable. The blood was hissing in his ears as he opened his jaw and bit.


	13. Here on the shoulder of the impossible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry/Draco and an extraordinary location

Picture a ravine as deep as time, scored into the jungle like the rut from a divine knife stabbed into the earth and dragged sideways along the cutting edge. Picture it as deep as your imagination goes ... and then go deeper. Things grow here that have never dreamt of sunlight. Shadows made flesh. Even stranger beings feed upon them, through rents and meshes you would never think to call a mouth. The depths of the Sigh are a place your nightmares do not dare to venture. It brushes off your naive certainties about what is possible.

Higher up, clinging to the sheer sides of the chasm, there is what you would recognise as life. Gargantuan nests dot the cliff face, busy with the breeding season; there is spiderweb the girth of a human arm and vines whose satiny pink flowers could be the petticoats of goddesses, until they swallowed you whole. The sporadic bursts of flame in the far depths are thought to come from a sightless breed of night-dwelling dragons, but nobody has ever returned with confirmation.

Elementary magic soars up from this place like a great swarm of black bats, potent enough to make a wizard's hair stand on end and a wand shiver in sympathy. With this heady stuff filling your lungs, you feel you could shift the world out of its orbit with the merest twist of your hand. Many a curious visitor has died here, certain that they could throw themselves into the void and conquer gravity by will alone.

Others have lived, but only because they flew. 

Here, in the very windpipe of the underworld, there is civilisation, or something like it. On the lip of the valley, on the north side, there is a scattering of huts that house the gatekeepers of this great mystery. These sturdy structures are walled with thick wood planks cut from the tallest jungle trees. They have to be: only giants could guard a place like this. Here is their paradise, where their proportions are finally made perfect. Here is where they come when age and wisdom raise them above the demands of tribal struggles. Here, in a semblance of harmony, they secure their realm, barricading it off from the curious, the foolhardy and the lost.

Some few lesser beings they suffer to enter their domain. On a grassy shelf, a few paces back from the precipice, you will find two men. One of them sits gingerly on a fallen tree branch, between ruffs of orange and white fungus, his walking stick resting against his knee. The other stands, wrist clasped in hand behind his back, in an awkward pose that suggests long subjection to discipline. Their attention is on the opposite side of the rift, where a Giant Augurey is feeding its chicks with bloody morsels that might once have been mammals.

"I suppose your friend Hagrid thought it was a good idea to send you here."

The sitting man, eventually, nods. 

"Does the Ministry know where you are?"

The sitting man turns to him, revealing the black patch that covers his left eye, the raw scar that runs back past his hairline, bisecting a silvery, older scar. "What do you think?"

That scathing answer cuts off further questions. The chicks' mealtime squabbling rises, their glossy black beaks clacking skyward once the last of the food is gone. The standing man, in time, presses on. 

"It's a pretty loveless place, you know. The giants spend a lot of time at their work. There's no visitors – apart from being unplottable, it's not safe for apparition. Someone told you about that in advance, obviously."

The parent bird launches off the side of the nest and glides down. They watch it disappear, sinking into the gloom. The place drifts into one of its rare quiet moments, just two wizards and a deep sea of magic. The standing man continues.

"It doesn't exist outside this valley. The Giant Augurey. The wings are too weak to fly without the magical updraughts." One of those very currents pulses up over the rim of the chasm, making their faces tingle. "The common strain is a tenth the size. You've seen it – a scrawny bird, none of those silver feathers. The augurey was a queen, here. If she wanted to move on, she had to adapt. Evolve. Become ordinary." 

A few minutes later, having received no response, he leaves. 

*

At night, the Sigh glows like a long, slitted eye in the black jungle. At dusk, at dawn and by moonlight, the pale yellow phosphorescence of escaping magic froths across its rim and the burst of dragon fire far below tints it with flickers of orange and red. 

A man paces along the grassy shelf, dragging one leg heavily. 

"Can't sleep?" comes a voice from not far away; a second figure emerges into the eerie glow. "It's the magic. It's stronger than what you're used to. It plays with your memories – you can dream about what didn't happen as often as what did." He turns his shoulder to the light. "You can torture yourself as long as you want to with the possibilities. But it gets better."

The limping man bends to knead his thigh brutally with his knuckles.

"It's not the nightmares." A grimace of pain grips his face. "The bone doesn't sit right. It was pretty much shattered when I left. There was no-one around to set it right, and it's too late now. The damage is done."

The night air is warm, thick with the too-sweet scent of the deadly flowers below. "How did it happen?"

"Goodnight, Malfoy."

Minutes pass. There's a rustle among the vines, a figure re-emerges, a hand out-stretched.

"Take meadowsweet, if it's giving you that much trouble. You'll find a patch behind the supply shed. Put a few leaves of this in a pot of tea, you'll sleep through anything."

*

It's no complacent task, to live on top of the Sigh. Each morning, the walls must all be checked. They run a league from the edge of the rift and eight leagues all around, suitable only for the stride of a giant. Anything that has scuttled out of the crevasse during the night must be tracked down and returned.

The smothering bower vine creeps daily up over the lip of the ravine, its pink flowers like hungry mouths. One wizard is severing tendrils with a sweep of spellwork; a second hex sears the seeping, broken stems. Flowers float like parachutes down into the shadow, rippling as they go. 

"Is it true you lost your eye in a drunken fight with a troll?"

The other wizard sits nearby, dark head bent over the creature-tangled nets that can only be unknotted with thin human fingers. He looks up, cricks his neck sideways. "Are you trying to be funny?"

"I'm trying to have a conversation. You're the only wizard for a hundred miles around and you don't make it easy. A stranger would think there was some sort of long-standing childhood grudge between us."

Laughter echoes across the chasm. "There isn't."

"Good. Where did you get it?"

A particularly intractable tangle in the net is plucked at; abandoned. 

"You're saying you don't know?"

"Assume I don't have a great many correspondents back in England. Assume I have one, and he's too busy with wedding plans to keep up on gossip."

A sweep of arm severs a whole patch of vine. The silence lasts long enough that it starts to seem permanent. 

"Okay. It was Gringotts' fault. They confiscated my vault and everything that was in it. They said it was reparations for the damage I did during the war. We're just a bank, a humble service provider, and why should we pay the bill for getting caught in the middle of a fight between wizards?" The net strains, then tears. "Fuck. It was the principle, anyway. It's not as if they didn't make a profit out of Voldemort. So I broke in."

He turns his attention distractedly to the flight of a dog-sized dragonfly which surfs the magical current up over their heads and disappears among the trees. 

"And?"

He unconsciously rubs his knee.

"The vault doors are iron, a foot thick. They're reinforced with every kind of magic. If you flood enough power into them, they still won't open, but in the end they shattered like a bomb blast." His good foot taps nervously, as it hasn't done since the first day, a good while ago. "I was lucky not to lose more. They say."

The sun climbs right up to its apex, and the precipice edge of the lawn has been clipped into a perfect line. Only then does the train of thought resume, rather abruptly.

"My father's a cunt."

The startled burst of laughter makes the Augurey chicks squawk and bustle. 

"Yes. He is."

*

The transition into the wet season only accentuates the strangeness of the place. Rain falls around the Sigh, not on it. The droplets' trajectory subtly alters, curving away from the breach. It falls into the jungle on both sides, where the water pools and trickles back down towards the ravine. On the lawn, a little spring is gushing up from the rocks and out into the void. The stream falls mostly (but not entirely) where gravity would dictate.

At the beginning and end of a downpour, if the light is right, a web of rainbows domes the ravine. It is enough to make anyone long to fly, some more than most. 

"How far would you have to go to get a broom?" says one man to the other, clearly more than just musing. They are lounging on grass plusher than a deep pile carpet, picking pieces of custard apple from a basket that lies between them. 

"You'd have to be suicidal. Quite apart from the fact that you'd only have to show your famous face in a big city around here to get recognised and arrested, there's the magic to think about. It's too unstable." 

There is the mediative crunch of a few mouthfuls 

"I'll make my own then."

"No you bloody well won't. Not while you're under my - whatever it is. I'm not fetching and carrying for you when you're down to stumps instead of legs." He gets a laugh for an answer, no mockery in it. "Although if you're up to thinking about spellwork again, there's a crack in the south-east wall I'm working on that could do with more than just planks to stop it up."

They are both still looking at the sky. "Okay." 

*

No longer testing the power of the Sigh but now simply playing in it, the slowly healing wizard pitches a small stone into the ravine. Catching a gust of magic, it turns into a garnet and plummets. He glances at his companion who, keeping his pale skin in the shade of the forest edge, is writing a letter. The next rock vanishes into a puff of pale blue smoke. 

"Makes you wonder what's actually real," he frowns, not for the first time.

A pebble becomes a gold coin, becomes a goldfish, becomes an apricot, and tumbles out of sight. The letter is abandoned.

"Do you want to leave?" His tone is the first note of tension in the languid afternoon.

A slow breath. Dark lashes flutter in consternation. A shrug. "There are worse places to be."

Up from the ravine soars a snitch, furiously glinting. They both jump as if to race for it, but it turns into a rock again and falls into the grass.

*

The morning is lovely - the clouds are a mix of cottony and sodden grey, and the light descends in bands that look like skewed golden pillars holding up the cloud canopy. It's the sort of view to convince you that the gods of weather have made a momentary work of art, for you and you alone. 

"Potter?"

"Hmm?" He is absorbed in the baby gecko which sits on the back of his hand, fixing him with a big-eyed stare. Its fine scales are scarlet and gold. 

"The current's strong today. Don't you think? It's making me quite muddle-headed."

"Better stay away from the edge then."

The gecko launches off his hand, snaps open a pair of glassy wings and soars away.

"It's not that. My balance is fine. I find I'd quite like to kiss you."

They both go very, very still. 

"You should," comes the mumbled reply. 

*

The Augurey chick cocks her head, as though listening for a sound that isn't where it should be. She flaps her newly fledged wings to steady herself in the current of magic that flows over the rim behind her, her silver-traced feathers fluttering. Hesitant steps bring her forward onto the grass carpet. From the muddy ground by the spring, she plucks a slow worm. This lush platform and all its treasures are hers, for now.

She, like all her ancestors, will live and die within a mile of this place. That is the price of their extraordinary gifts. 

Her three siblings cry and swoop among the updraughts in the chasm behind her. The wild magic nourishes what could never be dreamt of in ordinary landscapes. The Sigh is a hard place to come to; a harder place to leave. 

**


	14. Let the wind from the good old sea blow in, and let it sting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry/Draco - honeymoon - for emerald_dragon8

Harry woke up to the holler of a car horn somewhere in the narrow streets outside the hotel. Too late in the morning for delivery drivers. Probably a tourist bus carelessly parked. The bed was empty beside him, sheet pulled neatly up in contrast to the after-effects of all the squirming Harry had done in the relentless heat of the night. 

How much of this could he blame on the heat? If he'd picked a magical hotel, somewhere in the twisted lanes on the steep slopes of Galata, he would have cooled the room with his wand. And maybe he'd have woken up to the encouragement of Draco's mouth on the back of his neck, instead of this.

They were two days married and he had not of all things expected to find himself lonely. But slumming in bed was not going to change things. He fished out a fresh t-shirt and pushed his suitcase right up against the wall, perfectly aligned, in case the effort made a difference. He wielded the toothbrush roughly in his mouth.

If he'd thought the dreadful tension would end with the wedding, he'd been wrong. It had slunk with them into their honeymoon like a poisoned shadow, clinging to their heels. As if, after fighting so hard for so long, they had forgotten how to let their defences down. 

Last night, after a day of talking more to ticket attendants and waiters than to each other, they had gone to bed irritable and slept badly, too hot to touch, too awkward to risk worsening things with words. Harry had counted the distant beats of the radio in reception downstairs to keep the word _mistake_ out of his head. 

If it hadn't been for the friendly pity in George's voice when he'd gestured with his empty glass and said "Well the pond might be smaller for you lot but it's never going to be that small, is it?", there might never have been a first date. And if it hadn't been for the sneering headlines the next afternoon, under the shocked picture of Draco emerging from Harry's door, looking feral and defensive in the glaring flash in the 2am darkness, there almost certainly would never have been a second.

Since then, time had only stiffened the forces that sought to part them. It was as if Harry were some sort of state treasure who could not be permitted to fall into private hands. As if the Malfoys, never less acquisitive than after their narrow escape from imprisonment, could not be allowed to possess this one thing more. 

Draco could not be seen in another man's company after sundown without new allegations of betrayal in the headlines. It was hard to tell whether Draco had withdrawn from his friends or they from him. With Harry, the line had been starker. Since the day Hermione had used the expression "contrary infatuation", the day he had slammed the door in her face and burned her wedding invitation, Harry had not spoken a word to her, or to any of the former friends she might have reconciled him with. At the ceremony, there had only been the celebrant with his worried glances, no photographs to record the brittle blankness of both of their faces. 

They had been too busy showing the world that they couldn't care less to acknowledge the toll it took on the two of them. Some nights they had been more comrades than lovers, unable to manage any happier conversation than rehashing the latest slights against them, the slanders and lies that had become more weighty than the truth of what they had. Neither of them had asked whether this grim alliance was what they were fighting to save.

Before the car horn, he'd been emerging from sleep thinking of sex. Not a physical craving but more the thought that, when their bodies were wrapped up in each other, opening up for each other, nothing between them but skin, it was easier to believe that everything was going to be okay. Telling the world to go to hell had been easy – stubbornness came as second nature to both of them. It was now that called for real courage. He wanted to be sure that they had enough to make it work. The car horn went off in the street again. Harry spat, wiped his mouth and went up.

The terrace that topped off the sixth floor was glaring after the dark of the stairwell. Open on three sides, only a waist-high parapet broke the view south onto the Marmara, which under today's clear skies was gently and stunningly blue between the scattering of white boats that settled into her surface like pins in velvet.

Draco was sitting alone, a plate of fruit and a half-eaten slice of toast in front of him. The fact that he'd left off his shirt was probably for the sun, for once, and not the provocation value. After a moment, he raised his glass of orange juice to Harry and drank from it. A drop of condensation tipped off the bottom and fell into the hollow of his throat. Harry came up to the free chair and clutched the back of it. 

He had that old fear again. That he'd misread himself and misread Draco too. That they'd done this too much because the world had tried to stop them, and not enough because they meant it. 

"Where is everyone?" he asked. "It's not that late – they can't all have left already."

None of the staff could be seen, let alone a single guest. Draco shrugged as he put down his glass.

"Just lucky I guess." He pushed his chair back onto its rear legs and leaned on the parapet behind him, his chest catching the full sun like a sail. "Aren't you."

Harry couldn't help hoping. This silence wasn't the same as yesterday's, when Draco had bustled from Topkapi to Aya Sofia and onto an increasingly obscure series of mosques, fending off protests with brusque condescension, as if the last thing in the world he wanted to do was spend time alone with his new husband. Now, he arched his neck to lean right back over the rail, tilting his face up to the sky.

"What did you do?" 

"Try the peaches," Draco murmured without opening his eyes. "They're local. Better than anything you've had at home."

He looked serene under the sun. He sounded it too. You wouldn't know him for the man who less than 48 hours ago had snarled at the intruding photographer from Witch Weekly and shattered his camera against a tree, shouting over the top of Harry's protests as if the wedding had left him full of fury that he only needed the flimsiest excuse to let out. Today, he looked like a man who was ready to be happy.

Around the base of the middle finger of Draco's wand hand, draped over the railing, ran the band of silver, three hair-fine intertwined strands, each stitched into the skin. It was a gesture that Draco had insisted on, and Harry had not known whether to take it for a challenge or a test or an objectionable piece of pureblood arcana, even as they had stood in front of the altar and watched the celebrant do it to each of them in turn. Harry's magic ran in one of those threads, piercing the skin then emerging again, Draco's own magic in another, and the third was fresh-mined with the power of the earth still in it. It was not the sort of bond that could be undone.

How good it looked. How perfectly placed in the middle of Draco's hand, glinting in the sunlight as if his connection to Harry was a natural grown part of his flesh. Maybe it had been a lot more than a challenge. Maybe it was just the way Draco said these things that distracted so effectively from the gesture behind the words. 

He put his fingers on Draco's jaw, not to take him too much by surprise.

"The peaches," Draco repeated, but his lips came to rest with a parted sliver of invitation between them. 

Every time it struck him how Draco's mouth could look so forbidding – teeth and jaw and words always pointed – but yield so flirtatiously to the right sort of kiss. Every time he did it, some instinct in Harry expected rejection, and tingled with victory when it didn't come. He leaned down. Draco's mouth was cool and sweet from the juice. A tremor of breeze lifted the hair on the back of Harry's neck and vanished. The warmth this morning was penetrating, seeping with your blood into the depths of your bones until you felt as flexible and languid as a snake sliding down a rock. 

When he drew back, Draco's eyes were open and one arm had looped around Harry's neck. Harry kissed his cheek, smoothly shaved, and turned his nose into the tickle of Draco's hair, seeking out the closeness he'd wanted to wake up to.

"It was all worth it, you know," Harry said. "You. You were worth it."

Draco released him then, tucked his hands behind his head and let Harry just look at him, half naked and a little bit smug. 

"I will be."

Somewhere behind the smirk, Harry thought he caught a promise.

Draco took a strawberry from the plate and put the point of it into his mouth, breaking it with a slow bite that made Harry's lips tingle with the imaginary texture of seeds. His eyes did not let go of Harry's as he swallowed and slid out his tongue to draw in the rest. 

It was going to be all right. Something about this moment sealed it. 

Harry took the vacant seat and looked out at the view once again. The sea, the enormous sky, the bustle of boat traffic heading into the Golden Horn, the sun, the salty air, the buildings with their roof gardens and the skinny little alleys running between them, they were his. All his. Just for him. Draco had given them to him with a few words and a look. It was going to be all right.


	15. Forty two things that money can buy you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlie in a bathtub; Draco in a winning position (Charlie/Draco)

There were forty one dragons in the Carpathian sanctuary and Charlie had been there for the birth of a quarter of them. Since he'd scammed his way in as a cleaner, just shy of eighteen with enough cheerful determination to make up for his patchy NEWTS, and set about making himself indispensible to the keepers, he'd catalogued the length of every creature, their wingspans and flight speeds and the health of their teeth. He could recognise any one of them from flight pattern alone, even in cloud cover, and on a quiet enough night, he could tell which two of them were making battle cries at each other, and who had emerged victorious. 

Charlie leaned back in the water and spread his arms along the edge of the tub. The marks of their claws and breath were all over him. He knew who had left each scar – the scaly skin on his right shoulder; the three parallel lines across his back; the slit under his cheekbone from a clubbed tail; the burn on his left hand so bad that no healing potion had been strong enough to bring back the nails on the last two fingers. 

He arched to let the steam slide up the back of his neck and into his hair. They were his history and he was theirs. The cubs swatted him like a sibling until they got big enough to make him draw his wand. The older dragons responded grudgingly to his voice, even in their worst tempers.

Dragons could hardly be owned, but Charlie had earned them, and his senior standing among the dragon keepers recognised it. 

From outside came the brisk approach of footsteps, and the door opened to admit the man whose arrival had undermined Charlie's hard-won authority. 

Draco Malfoy looked about as pleased as expected to see a huge hexagonal bathing tub set smack bang in the middle of the floor of the brand new recreational area his money had built according to his exact and inflexible designs. It was probably a good thing Malfoy's arms were full of paperwork, making it difficult to draw his wand. He wouldn’t have expected to find anyone in the place at all, since the keepers pointedly snubbed his new state-of-the-art facility in favour of their campfire, and he had responded to their slight with a permanent, barely concealed sneer. 

"Where did you put the table?" Malfoy snapped.

Years in the company of a close-knit team of keepers, managing animals with the emotional intelligence of a two year old, had made conflict negotiation an unfamiliar skill for Charlie, but here he congratulated himself on a simple point made in a satisfyingly arsey manner. 

He grinned. "Up on the ridge above Brunhilde's nest. If you're going to start bringing in your hob-nob friends to gawk at the dragons, they may as well have a close-up view while they're clinking their glasses."

The Malfoys certainly hadn't purchased the dragons themselves. As the hapless clerk in the Ministry building in Bucharest had explained after listening to Charlie use every single Romanian curse he knew at least twice over, they didn't even technically own the land, which was a national reserve. What they'd purchased from a cash-strapped Ministry struggling to build the facilities for the approaching World Cup was the exclusive right to develop the land, which meant that for twenty years the dragon keepers couldn't erect anything bigger than a tent without their say so.

When a much younger Charlie had left home to come here, his parents had bought him a new trunk (second hand) and a wrist watch that had stopped running in the third week. Draco Malfoy's parents, notwithstanding a reparations bill that would have crippled a small country, had found a way to pretty much buy him his own sanctuary.

"Well if you don't-" 

Malfoy finally appeared to notice that he was naked under the bath water. He roused up a new kind or sneer that said he'd seen it all before – and from what Charlie had heard from his London friends who frequented the underground clubs that were too little about sex and too much about uglier things, Malfoy probably had. "Put it back as soon as you've finished. I hardly expect gratitude but I won't stand for vandalism."

He threw his armful of books and scrolls down onto one of the desks by the bookshelves and unrolled a two-foot-wide building plan. The way he bent right down over it in the dim light of Charlie's candles made Charlie wonder if he could even tell what building it was of. 

"Sure, boss," Charlie replied, kicking his legs to make a satisfying splash. "Though I'm afraid I'll be in here a while."

Malfoy twisted around to give him a protracted glare, which Charlie made the most of by stretching his arms up lazily and pulling his bent elbows over his spine to make his biceps stand out. Malfoy gave a little sniff that was probably supposed to be scornful, but it was a long moment before he turned away.

Charlie wasn't vain, but he knew what he liked in a man, and he liked what he saw in the mirror. His body had been sculpted by dragons: muscles laid on thick around the shoulders and back for leashes and nets, obstinate thighs that could dig in against a cub twice his body weight, and the flexibility that came from a life free from the strictures of chairs and desks. He didn't know when the peak of his physical fitness was going to come, but his limbs told him he was working up to it nicely, and damned if he wasn't going to use it while it lasted. 

Half-hidden by Charlie's cast off clothes was a bottle. He gave it a quick shake and loudly popped the top. As he filled one of the two flutes until the white froth spilled into the bath water, Malfoy whipped around.

Whenever he didn't have his sneer ready, Malfoy's thoughts had a habit of writing themselves right over his face. Right now, he looked like he was expecting a trap, but was contemplating walking into it for the chance that it was something else. From the solitary nights he spent with his plans up here, and the covetous looks he'd let slip at more than one of the dragon keepers, Charlie had already figured that sex wouldn't be too far from his thoughts. 

"Expecting company, are you?" Malfoy said. 

Charlie licked the trail of foam down the side of the glass in off-handed obscenity. "Half right. Come over here."

Charlie stood up, the waterline just high enough to keep a bit of mystery, and held out the glass. Malfoy's grip on the back of the chair said that Charlie cut a pretty fine figure as Temptation personified. 

"Come on," he said. "Afraid that one drink might make you do something you'll regret?"

Malfoy's gaze flitted back up to the glass. "Hardly. I'm merely wondering whether your attempts at subtlety could become any more incompetent."

"Charlie Weasley," Charlie grinned. "Dragon keeper. Try subtlety on a brooding Longhorn and you'll be taking your plums home in an urn. I can come and get you if you'd rather do it that way."

Malfoy visibly sized up whether Charlie was capable of it, and concluded that he could be. 

"On the other hand," Malfoy said, and with a snap of his fingers the glass disappeared from Charlie's grasp. 

Having got it, Malfoy had to do something with it. At the first sip, a ripple of distaste passed over his face. Then he threw back the rest in one long, thirsty swill. 

"I'll give you this much, Weasley. At least you knew not to insult a good dinner by serving this with it. Another."

From the lowered floor of the tub, Malfoy's legs as he stalked over looked very long in the continuous line of dark brown boots and three-quarter length trousers, and as he poured, it occurred to Charlie that Malfoy's obsessive elegance was the sort of thing he could have fallen hard for when he'd been young and reckless with an appetite for anything he shouldn't have had. 

Malfoy drained the second glass too. When he threw it away, the vibration of the shattering pieces went straight to Charlie's cock.

"All right then. Charlie Weasley, dragon keeper." The square toe of Malfoy's boot poked over the side of the tub, big droplets clinging to the glossy black leather. Looking at its meticulous seam work made Charlie feel exceptionally naked. "Would you care to stop pissing about and tell me what it is that you want?"

Charlie let his gaze cling from the toes of Malfoy's boots right up to his wide eyes. 

"A bit of that will do."

Rumour said that Malfoy liked a lot of orders and filthy talk, and didn't fuck much, but Charlie was counting on his solitary life here to give him a taste for something more immediate. Certainly he didn't do any more than hitch his breath when Charlie went straight for his cock.

Malfoy's pale lashes seemed to flutter ever so slightly as Charlie squeezed him through the tight fabric of his trousers. But as Charlie unbuttoned him, he was staring at the undulating surface of the bath water with exactly the same frown he'd used on a misaligned row of bricks when the walls to this building had gone up. Charlie wanted to take away his composure and make him howl, and he was thinking of a way to do it when against all expectation Malfoy gave a muffled sort of groan and sank down to his knees. 

Charlie could strip off a fire-licked jacket between one blink and another. It took a single smooth movement to get Draco's trousers around his thighs. 

"Well hello," Charlie said. Malfoy had the sort of proportions that popular opinion ascribed to men who compensated by way of accomplishments. Even well fondled already, it was one of the smallest of the hundreds he had had. 

Malfoy drew the sort of breath that was going to lead to something nasty.

In a heartbeat, Charlie had his mouth around it. Charlie was a connoisseur of cock: he had never met one he couldn't learn to like, and on lonely nights he woke up dreaming of the first wet touch of a cockhead on his top lip or his cheek. Against all expectation, Malfoy's surprising inadequacy roused him to desire for something different, new territory for his tongue. He was suddenly hungry for the taste of it, craving the easy dominance his strong mouth made, the over-proportioned weight of Malfoy's balls swinging behind it.

Charlie had long ago worked out that the key to unforgettable sex was only a matter of enthusiasm, and he knew how to suck like a starving man.

He left Malfoy panting and flushed and brutally satisfied, wilting onto his back among the puddles around the bath. 

But Malfoy wasn't done. "I assume you've got something you'd like to say to me now."

"What?"

He'd been staring at the unexpectedly erotic sight Malfoy made, with his trousers rumpled around the tops of his boots, his crisp white shirt clinging with splashed bathwater, and in between, his bare thighs and cock. Charlie ran his tongue between his lips and his teeth, sucking out the taste of sex. 

"If you want to fuck me, you can spit it out first. Whatever it is. Say it now or suck it up forever."

On top of his previous distraction, the bald offer pretty much decimated Charlie's negotiation skills.

"The table for a start." He struggled to recall the grievances that provided nightly conversation around the campfire. "This is not a place for fucking dinner parties. And the new cabins get built back in the village. Not here."

Malfoy unbuttoned his shirt, from the bottom up, going slowly.

"You all said this building would ruin the place," he replied airily, using the pop of buttons for emphasis. "I think you'll find the dragons can't see it from the air, and it runs on so little magic you've already got two of them building a nest a stone's throw away. Not to mention the fact that you need the funding too badly to be fussy about how you get it."

Charlie had to admit two things. Malfoy's rec hall had turned out more competent than any of them expected, and the sight of Draco Malfoy's long, white body undressing was a fairly effective counter-argument to anything. 

"You don't get it. It's not-" Malfoy planted a boot in the middle of Charlie's chest, not gently. Charlie's tongue went a bit unreliable as he squeezed the pliant leather and scrabbled with the laces. "The problem is – look, it's the people. A few of us they hardly notice, but you put a village in here, it's like-" The knots came loose with a murmured spell from Malfoy's mouth. "It's like offering them a three course dinner." 

Still on his back, Malfoy had lost all his bristle, so why didn't Charlie feel like the one in control? Even as he wrenched off the second boot and peeled Malfoy's trousers free, his thoughts were still floundering about. 

"We're blessed to have your experience," Draco said, parting his legs and writhing like he was one parts snake and three parts professional whore. "All of it."

He wound his legs under Charlie's arms and pulled him down. Where Charlie's hands splayed over his ribs for balance, the skin was so smooth that Malfoy could be the softest thing in the entire reservation. Oh hell. How long since Charlie had had anybody who wasn't head-to-toe scars with the resin from the fire-retardant broom polish in the cracks of their palms?

"All right. Forget the table. But the cabins go."

"Charlie," Draco murmured in his ear, and his tone of voice brought to mind silk sheets and velvet patterned wallpaper and depths of filth that Charlie had never thought to dream of. He was inviting and manipulative and still, under it all, dangerous. He bit cruelly at Charlie's earlobe and wound his arms in a caress around Charlie's neck. "Let it go."

Then there was the way he kissed. 

Later, as Charlie slipped his fingers into Malfoy's mouth to get them thoroughly wet, he had one optimistic thought. Negotiation was not one of his strengths, but plenty of practice could only be good for him. 

*


	16. Exeunt pursued by pirates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry/Draco in a retelling of Pericles in all its ludicrous glory

What's a nice boy like me doing in a place like this?

Ha! If you think that sort of clichéd nonsense is going to get you special treatment, well you know where you can shove it. And there's a surcharge for that sort of handling, too. Cash in advance, unmarked, in an envelope at reception.

One. I am not a nice boy. If you want to test that, put me in a room with a pie dish, a pepper shaker and your children's pet bunny rabbit and see what happens. Two. This is Mytilene's most expensive brothel. If you don't know what we do in here, this is going to be the easiest fifty galleons I've ever made. 

But I'll tell you if you like. It's your money after all. 

I wasn't always a courtesan, you know. 

Shut up. Unless you want to leave here with the sort of boils that proctologists photograph for their trophy rooms, shut your ignorant mouth and let me tell this bloody story. 

I was born in a palace. Well, as good as. A manor is the next best thing, and we had servants, of a sort. It's good that you're a wizard. When I tell this to the Muggle clients, they think of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and I have to show them pictures before they can get it out of their heads that I might have a fetish for frolicking in the gardens with the staff, inventing new names for our private parts. 

My father was a ... let's just say he was a powerful man. I mean, we weren't _rich_ or anything. The manor was just a little place – thirty acres or so, and most of that was landscaped gardens and sculpture courts. Not a Petit Trianon in sight. Just some odds and ends left over from both sides of the family – a marble god or two from Delphi, those amphorae that probably weren't from the actual court of Minos no matter what my Grandmama used to claim, a few Astartes from Ur or thereabouts, a bit of Middle Kingdom bric-a-brac – it's not as if we had anything genuinely _old_. I mean, even the observatory was new – Wren was nearly eighty when he drew the plans, hardly his most ambitious work. 

So I was brought up to know where I belonged. And that was right at the top of a huge ladder of tradition. Every generation just added more rungs, I suppose, without really knowing where it was all going.

And with all that behind me, I was hardly going to marry a nobody from anywhere north of Watford, was I? Although as it turned out I may as well have.

On my nineteenth birthday, my father announced a competition for my hand. Yes, of course these things are still done. Just not in some countries. We had to go to Naxos. Obviously not the actual Naxos, full of Muggles and all, but a little island in the vicinity of Naxos that had been in Dad's family for a bit. Doesn't have a name, otherwise anyone could Apparate there whether we wanted them or not. We just call it "the backyard". 

Anyway, he put it in all the papers that there was a pureblood of impeccable breeding and unmatched personal charm – that would be me – didn't I tell you to shut up? – in want of suitors.

I had my picture done in a chiton, or what amounted to about quarter of a chiton once my mother had finished arranging it to resemble what she called "natural", sitting on one of our Corinthian altars with a staff that was supposed to be knowledge or integrity or possibly some sort of phallic insinuation for anyone who found that kind of thing important in a son-in-law. It was more Caravaggio than Boucher, a bit muscular, kind of early Baroque meets nude football calendar. A good thing too, I'd told the painter to take plaster casts of both his hands because the originals were going to be fed to the gnomes if I came out looking like a chubby shepherd.

The whole thing went off like an Erumpent in a sock – which is an expression that had always troubled me until that moment, when it all became clear. A great mass of activity in a place several times too small. One day, our beach was good for an early morning dip in nothing but what nature intended. The next, you'd have been paddling in the bilge water from three dozen triremes – you know the style of the old Greek battle ships, with the eyes on the prow that wink at you – not to mention giving the lie to that insinuation with the staff in the picture. 

Dad counted over 800 house elves to do the rowing – some sort of record apparently, it even beat the year they held the World Cup in the Caymans. Counting the ones who did it the old fashioned way and sent emissaries before turning up in all their finery, there were 71 separate proposals. Although two of those came from close family members because Dad refused to risk the number 69 going down in the record books, and I suspect that a few of the letters he wouldn't let me read were from gentlemen offering something a bit less than the full honour of marriage, and yes I do blame Mum's messing about with the chiton for that. 

I didn't let any of that bother me though because life was pretty much a 24 hour non-stop party. Feasting for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the gaps in between stuffed with gifts, and gifts, and more gifts. Mostly for Dad, who could now splinch himself with a family of octopuses and still not be stuck for a diamond cuff link. But I was showered with them too, more than I could stuff into the one cellar that wasn't full of the retinues of the suitors. Sweet Circe, I was surrounded by so many spell-enhanced young beauties that my mouth got stuck on permanent flirt and the house elves started wearing curtains for fear I had designs on their virtue.

Did I feel like a princess? Well I was so full of oysters and champagne there was no way I could have fitted one in. Shut up. It still feels fresh for me, and you've only heard it the once. 

It was about then that Dad got greedy. As everybody knows, there's pretty much no wizarding blood left in the royal houses of Europe – revolutions and fast cars have pretty much wiped them out. But he thought he'd found one in Denmark and one in Spain who might do, and since he couldn't very well write to them like a common pimp offering my arse on a silver platter, he did two things that hadn't previously been equalled in stupidity in the three and a half centuries since Thomas Farriner, experimental spell-caster of Pudding Lane, London, turned to his apprentice and said, "Fiendfyre? Sounds unpleasant. Better put on the protective spectacles before we cast that one."

Firstly, he put off the selection by a month. And then he decided to give me away to the winner of a tournament. 

Needless to say, three weeks and six days after that I was oozing caviar and fresh lobster from every pore and only saved from surrendering to fat by the exercise needed to keep out of the hands of the several suitors who had reached the end of their patience and felt that the pleasure of my personality alone was insufficient recompense for showering me in jewels and compliments.

What are you finding so confusing about this shutting up business? Close your mouth. Keep it that way. If you need to breathe, try a different orifice. I can make you another if you can't find one that serves the purpose. 

So you can imagine the sheer frustration of life on a small island, surrounded by eager beauty and soft sand, and watched over by a father who believed that a tardy semblance of virginity was sure to drive up the dowry price.

The eve of the tournament approached. And that's when the hand of Fate descended. Although how do we know it's anything so subtle as a hand? What it felt like from where I was standing, was a wholly different part of the anatomy, like I was an ant sitting in the middle of the one free seat in the medical rooms where Madam Fate had just happened to waddle in to have her latest case of gout seen to. 

Malfunctioning Portkey. Harry bloody Potter. Need I say more?

The wretch turned up on our sodding beach, two hours before the opening of the competition.

"Tournament?" he says.

"For what?" he says.

"You're on!" he says.

The predicable fucking reckless fucking prat.

No impulse control, that's his problem. Scuttles into a challenge like a Niffler into a goldsmith's dustbin.

And you know what's even more predictable than that? He won. Slaughtered the competition. Even provoked my father to use language I'd only heard before from behind his bedroom door when my mother was away visiting her friend Judith in Montreal.

I'd barely had time to work out which one of the duellist brothers from San Sebastian I was most disappointed to be missing out on when the feasting was done with and the wedding night was upon me. 

The bridal suite was its own enormous pontoon a hundred metres or so off the now deserted beach. Harry hardly covered himself in glory that night, pacing around and making stupid jokes about whether I was the sort of trophy that needed polishing, and when I'd be putting on that bloody chiton, as if I hadn't heard that one from arsehole to breakfast every day since it had been painted. He couldn't even look at the bed, which was all in pristine white as if someone hadn’t thought very hard about the implications of having two grooms and no bride. He just paced, with his hands in his pockets, until I started to think he must have done it for the sheer competition and not really meant to win at all.

Then he gave me a look that was hungrier than my imagination could have stretched to after five solid weeks of feasting, and he fell on my throat like some bizarre crocodile/vampire mutant. After that – well, I don't need to tell you the rest. We have a phone line you can call if you like that kind of thing. 

The next morning – actually, I don't think I need to tell you that bit either. In the afternoon, we had a lovely, slow bottle of moscato and a bowl of strawberries, and I found out that Harry was the type who liked to talk after all, only he liked to get more urgent things out of the way first. Then there was a leisurely spot of swimming, a little lazy flirting over gin martinis at sunset, and the sort of evening I especially don't need to tell you about. 

Let's face it, if you've never been married, you can imagine it. If you have, you'll remember exactly which body parts should be wincing in sympathy about now. 

There was days of this, you have to understand. Weeks, even. Some days we'd take the raft from the jetty at the end of the beach and go fossicking about the islands. Duty called us to dinner with my parents every now and again. And other days Harry would cut the pontoon free from its moorings and take us out into the middle of the sea where there was nothing but fresh fish and sunlight and more of what I didn't think I'd ever be able to get enough of.

One night – and you don't need the details but let's just say I was in a pretty unstrategic position for negotiation – Harry said, "Come home with me."

As soon as I got my mouth clear, I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of that. What was wrong with him? We had everything we could want. Clean sand. Warm ocean. Not a single discomfort ... apart from dehydration, lack of sleep, and a little localised chafing – nothing that a swipe of ointment and a couple of days of separate rooms couldn't cure.

But no, he had to go. Something about his technically being Minister for Magic and that not being the sort of role that allowed for extended leave of absence. 

That was where it all went wrong. It should have been simple. It's two Apparitions to Izmir, and from there it's a few clear stops along the Floo route to get back to London.

But I was feeling a bit queasy by that point – and you can lose that snigger before I wipe it permanently off your face. It's a biological impossibility. Listen to me. Wizards can't get conceive. Admittedly, with my luck and the amount of time Harry spent trying, if it was ever going to happen it would have happened to me. But no. I was just a bit ill. Too much time indoors and a diet low in nutrients.

So when it came my turn to do the second leg of the Apparition, I raised my wand. The spell was half out of my mouth when my stomach seized up again. I can't even tell you what word I said. Whatever it was, it was the definition of wrong. I felt inside-out, hurtling like a one-winged pixie through a tunnel made of light. I landed on the beach somewhere hot and glaring, opened my eyes just in time to see a crab scuttling into the rocks with my wand in its claw. 

And Harry. I'd heard him scream out my name as we whirled away from each other. Then it cut off, like-

It cut off more suddenly than any spouse wants to hear, ever, even in the depths of nightmares. Okay? No I don't know where he is. It's been two years and the man who squashed the competition like so many tadpoles in my wedding tournament hasn't even answered the note I managed to send back to England the one time I got away long enough to make it to a Muggle post box. Do I think he's dead? I don't think about it. We made promises to each other, not just in the ceremony but in the days after it. I don't think that kind of thing. If all I can do is hope and remember and call out his name when I'm half asleep, well fuck it that's my side of the bargain, isn't it? Bad bargain, you think? Well who asked you anyway. You don't go back on it, no matter how bad it gets. That's what a promise means.

No I fucking don't need – get away from me!

I don't care what you paid for. You've got a story now. Shut up and listen because it gets worse.

It turned out I was in Ephesus, and the local big guy was a friend of a friend of my father's, or so he said. The thing with being my father's son is you never know when friend means "friend" and when it means "backstabbing little Death Eater turd whose bowels I'd like to rip out through his eye sockets".

For reasons we'll get to, in this case I later came to suspect option B.

His name was Cleon, and his wife Dionyza took me in with a frostier smile than even my mother could have managed at the height of one of her sisterly feuds. Oh they fed me and clothed me, and kept me away from the probable death I'd have faced if left to fend for myself wandless among Muggles (although since I've now seen some without their clothes on, I've started to doubt whether Dad might have been a bit misguided in the stories he told me).

But the problem was, those weeks of beckoning suitors with one hand and fending them off with the other, they came back to me quicker than a man can take a breath. I could hardly help it! I was alone and friendless and heaven knows I had to survive. 

The big man had a daughter he was trying to marry off. Pretty thing, and as kind as you could hope for, but really the Ephesus education had done nothing to recommend her to a husband. Stiff-armed spellwork and the sort of nerves that made everyone stand behind her for safety every time she drew her wand. The smell of failed potions that stuck under her fingernails no matter how much peppermint oil she dipped them in. Nice girl, I was fond of her, but was it my fault if all her suitors ended up in my bed?

Possibly there were warning bells I should have picked up earlier, but the moment I was pretty sure it had all gone to hell in a handbasket was when Dionyza's half-giant manservant, Leonine, walked me out onto the headland, put a knife to my throat, and invited me to say my prayers. 

I begged – of course I did, I'd hardly been brought up to believe my life was worth throwing away for something so temporary as pride. 

Then the strangest thing happened, while I was on my knees there on the cliff top with the blade digging into my windpipe. I was kidnapped by pirates. 

Yep. Kidnapped by pirates – the gangplank, the wooden legs, the cutlasses, the whole caboodle.

I beg your pardon? It's _what?_

When you say "totally fucking predictable", I have to ask myself whether have you ever stumbled across a dictionary in your sorry excuse for a life, or perhaps been struck a few too many times over the head with one. Look at a map. We were 1500 miles from Somalia, and in the wrong bloody ocean in any case. 

Though I have to admit, they were wizarding pirates, so their means of travel could have been unorthodox. 

So there I was, stuck on a leaky tub, doomed to a life of rum, sodomy and the lash – yes, you can cut that out before you start, thank you – and still, technically, not finished my honeymoon. It was almost a blessing when they dropped me off here in Mytilene. 

I thought – you'll laugh at this and for once I'll let you. I thought they must have known who I was when they set me up in a room with the second biggest bed I had seen in my life (Weren't you listening before? Dad sometimes had three or four of his friends visit when my mother was in Montreal) with velvet on the walls and a champagne bottle already on ice. 

I thought – and if you laugh at this bit you'll find your tongue in a place you never expected it could reach – that maybe Harry had found me at last and arranged somewhere romantic for our reunion. 

Then the first client came in.

He was a Muggle. It was a good while before they dared send another one of those. 

The wizards were tougher. I couldn't count the number of times I've been shackled to this bed, or that table over there. But I've got a remarkable immunity to muffling hexes, and as long as I can still talk, I can drain the strongest libido in a matter of minutes. Sometimes I tell them I've found god. Sometimes I give them a catalogue of half-factual venereal diseases (a girl I knew at school was a goldmine for this sort of thing, if you didn't mind being scanned for Nargles first). 

And whenever I get a lunatic too far gone to care about either his mortal soul or his health, well I usually tell him this story. 

Ha! Admit it, it worked. Right now, you're a little bit worried that you'll never be able to work up a decent stiffy again. Want your money back? Ask at reception, they're used to it by now. Two years and I haven't let one of them touch me, not once. It's enough of a rest that I'm almost ready for another go at Harry, if I knew where he was. Or if he was-

What are you still doing here?

Familiar? No you don't look familiar, moron. You look like every second loser who comes in here – I'll bet you even bought your fake beard off the guy who walked out of here yesterday evening. 

No.

It can't be. Not after-

Dad??

Dad.

You filthy, filthy old reprobate. You've been trawling every brothel between here and Athens I suppose, and called it searching for your long lost son. 

What were the chances of finding me in a brothel, in any case? 

Shut up. I do have skills. And let me put it this way, Dad, exactly how many role models did I have in my formative years? 

Why on earth would you try a backwater like Mytilene anyway – I mean it's a scrap of a port village filled with the sort of tourists who want to send home an amusing postcard from Lesbos. 

You-

Dad, you can't be serious. Prophetic visions my arse. There are two problems with that. One. I know for a fact you haven't believe in the powers of the divine since the day Mum came home early from Montreal and told Uncle Jeremy, Uncle Hercules and Uncle Marie-Antoinette that they were never to set foot in her house again. Two. I know for a fact that you do believe in the powers of Mr Ogden's finest chased with Manticore venom. 

The goddess did not lead you to Mytilene, Dad. The goddess has not been talking to you in your dreams. What you're describing is not magical, but it is treatable if you find the right physician.

She says what?

Dad, you had better be certain about this. You had – you had just better be sure. Because if this is some sort of potion induced whackery, I will skin you and bone you with my bare hands and serve you in kebabs to the next filthy stag party that fronts up at the hostel. 

Tell me again, and do not dare be confused, or evasive, or wrong. 

Harry is where?

That's a temple. What in Merlin's sorry name is Harry doing in a temple? Really? And your goddess knows all about Apparition-induced amnesia, does she?

He hasn't sworn himself to celibacy, has he?

No of course the goddess doesn't know that. My mistake. Does she know whether it's reversible? Oh.

Oh.

Oh get off me, Dad. A bit late for all that, don't you think? Now what are you standing about for? Get me a Portkey to the temple, a good dose of Runespoor blood, and a private room on a very, very long lease.

And Dad?

If I ever catch you in a brothel again, I will personally hex off your wedding tackle and mount it in silver for mum to use as a new perch in her owlery.

Oh can't I? Well give me a wand and we'll just bloody well see, shall we?

Shut up.

**


	17. Hard work is good for you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neville/Draco on the docks

Neville stared up at the cranes as he passed. One of them was empty and still, its mast at rest. The other was slowly lowering a pallet full of crates that were each big enough to have a car inside. At the base of its mast, a man who looked the size of a beetle by comparison sat at the controls, moving the metal monster with what was a lot like magic. That was the scale of things in the Muggle world, where everything seemed bigger than it needed to be, always bursting, always hungry for more space. 

Neville, who preferred the gentler pace of the magical world, went briskly along the fence, sharing a brief nod with a couple of dock workers passing in their bright safety vests. He left the modern docks behind and, with a quick spell to cloud the security cameras, vaulted over the safety barrier and clattered down the old wooden stairs to the disused wharves that lay behind. That was more like it: silent and still.

It was probably pointless to come here – Malfoy had said not before the weekend. But Neville had left the meeting at St Mungo's so angry that his hands trembled, and doing anything at all was better than sitting at home to let that kind of temper fester. When he went back next week, he was going to need complete calm if he wanted to make them listen to him; he could not afford to put a foot wrong. It would not only be the healers but his grandmother as well, and for twenty three years, she had decided every question to do with his mother's care. She was the sort of woman whom even strangers instinctively deferred to. It was only now, in adulthood, that Neville understood how much Augusta had done for him and for his mother. And that made it all the harder to fall out with her. 

Keeping a good distance from the warehouse, which had a hole like a dragon's bite in the roof that erased the last letters from the Oakshaft sign, he came around onto the loading dock and stopped in the shadow of an ancient stack of barrels. At the end of the pier, a single boat was disgorging an unlikely quantity of boxes. Since he couldn't see anything on deck, the crew were probably magical and working under some pretty good concealment spells. There was only one visible figure. At the top of the gangplank, a man was bending over a rectangular crate, pushing and rattling it as if to test what it would be like in the lifting. 

Neville watched. He deserved a bit of free entertainment after the way St Mungo's Head of Spell Damage had said things like "How often we see family members unconsciously substituting their own desires for the patient's", as if he needed another reminder that even though he was her only son, he was the one person among them who'd never so much as had a conversation with her. 

The dock was nearly deserted, because more and more of the maritime traffic had moved down to Tilbury since the building of the Ministry in the seventeenth century had started to draw the magical centre southwards, so the labourer could not have imagined there would be an appreciative audience as he drew out a hammer from his belt and corrected a stray nail on the top of the crate. He was just a working man at his trade, bending over at the waist with his thighs tense under his combat trousers and his shirt slipping up his back. That was no reason for Neville to glance down in case a glimpse of his underpants might be revealed above his waistband as his clothes shifted. 

The man tucked the hammer back into his belt, squatted, and hefted the carton onto his shoulder. Neville swallowed as he stood, working all the muscles down his legs, spine perfectly straight. He drew more closely into the barrels' shade as the man came down the gangplank, face hidden behind the crate on his shoulder. The bare arm that held it place flexed, revealing a healthy swell of muscle, and Neville thought he could see, where his arm bent up, a tuft of light hair where it met his trunk. 

Buff wasn't even Neville's type: when it came to blokes he tended towards the domestic, low-maintenance sort, good for lazy mornings in dressing gowns, sharing the paper and making each other laugh, or at least that was how Stuart had been for the three months it had lasted. Even so, there was something about the docks that encouraged ridiculous fantasies of callused hands in the alley behind a sea-side tavern; rough, salty kisses against the wall of the hold. 

Adding the crate to a pile on the dock, the man picked up a clipboard resting on top of one of the bollards and jogged up the gangplank, where the obscuring charms promptly swallowed him. 

Neville took that for the end of the show. He should, he supposed, do what he came for and find Malfoy's office. 

Inside, the warehouse was unlit, apart from the hole overhead, and a bit imposing with its massive roof and towering stacks of crates, full of the smell of rotting wood. It felt extremely old, like half the contents and the air itself might have lain here unmoved for a century or more. 

There was nowhere inside that resembled an office, apart from one poky, unroofed set of walls in the corner. His shout went unanswered, but this was definitely the only non-Muggle dock in the port, and Malfoy had been quite clear about where his goods were landed. He remembered Malfoy walking around the half-renovated Willow Gate house, three weeks ago, shifting the hem of his formal robes disdainfully to keep them out of the plaster dust and splinters as he itemised the order Neville would need. There was nowhere here he could imagine Malfoy consenting to keep his office. When he walked around one of the stacks, the stencilled label on it said 1931, and the dust coating its struts was deep.

At the sound of footsteps, Neville peered around the stack to see the man from before coming in. As he adjusted his focus against the brighter light from behind, the first thing Neville saw was that he was carrying two crates, one on top of the other on his left shoulder and heavy enough to make his arm muscles quiver in their hold. The second thing he noticed was that the owner of the arms was Malfoy.

He let the front of the crates rest against the door to the poky corner space as he fished a key out of his pocket. He looked easy and masculine and highly competent.

"Malfoy." 

Spinning toward the sound, Malfoy dropped the key, lost the delicate balance of the crates so that the top one began to slide, snatched his free hand at it with a horrible sound of scraping fingernails, then finally caught it with some sort of desperate wandless shout about an inch off the ground. He was setting it down very gently when Neville came forward.

"Sorry."

"Bloody hell, Longbottom! Watch yourself, will you." With an effort, he worked the second crate off his shoulder and put it on top of the other. "How did you get in?"

He'd pretty much just bluffed through the Muggle gates by walking with the stride of a man who knew where he was going and had better not be interrupted in getting there, but there had been an explosive tone to Malfoy's response that made him want to changing the subject. 

"Who were you expecting? Get a lot of pirates in these parts, do you?"

Even as he grinned, he remembered why Malfoy would have very good reason to be nervous.

"Oh. Not pirates, of course. Aurors, was it?"

Malfoy's mouth turned ugly. "Why stop there? It's not as if they're the only department with a particular obsession with my business. I could name four or five others."

From the enquiries he had made before he'd placed his order, Neville knew that the two years of Malfoy's business had been characterised by licence breaches, hotly resisted regulatory shake-downs, and more than a handful of criminal convictions. Only his customers seemed to be satisfied, especially the ones like Luna and her father who wanted to import items that were on the questionable side of legal.

"I doubt the entire Ministry's after you, Malfoy."

"Do you?" Somehow Malfoy managed to say it with all his old haughtiness, more sneer than speech, as if he were standing there in full dress robes instead of workman's clothes with the sleeves under his arms slightly dark with sweat. "Thank you for your expertise. What do you want here?" 

There was not much to say for his customer service. He picked up the key and fitted it forcefully into the door, turning his back. Neville automatically made the most of the opportunity to study the view from the rear. The strength of his arms was deceptive: Malfoy was still slender about the hips and ribs, like the wisp of a boy he had been at school. He had the sort of muscle that looked like it would melt away if not kept in constant work. The hint of delicacy that still lay underneath his workman's conditioning made a beguiling contrast to Neville's eye. He had to swallow. 

"My order – has it arrived yet?"

Having opened the door, Malfoy seemed to think better of going in. "Next week. Which one of those words confused you?"

"You said it could be earlier."

"Highly unlikely. It's a specialty product, hand-made to your measurements, and even ideal conditions won't take more than a day off the voyage from Alexandria. Next week at the earliest."

"Can't you-"

Malfoy crossed one arm over his chest to rub the back of his shoulder, looking weary. 

"You wanted it fully documented. You were quite clear about that." Neville did not recall being told in so many words that there was any other way to do it, but perhaps there had been undertones he had missed. "It's an experimental product. That means extra testing, extra paperwork, and, in conclusion, not before next week." 

"The healers are meeting on Monday to decide."

"For Merlin's sake - decide what?"

Neville looked up to examine the hole in the ceiling, like it had become important. "About my – my mother. Whether she can be moved or not. If the carpets were in place, I could convince them to bring her out and see if they're strong enough."

From the subtle professional scoffing he had endured this morning, he could not imagine that anything short of literal proof would convince the healers that a patient who had spent more than two decades with round-the-clock magical protection could live in an ordinary home with her magic dampened to prevent harm to herself or others. And even literal proof wouldn't carry much weight with his grandmother. 

"They have to be installed by Monday. There's no choice."

Malfoy evidently took that entirely the wrong way. He drew himself up, broadening his shoulders to their full width. "Or what?"

Without a wand, it would be suicidal of Malfoy to start a fight, but that didn't stop Neville's stomach clenching as if he might really throw a punch, and as if it might be a crippling one. His heart pumped. The defensive adrenaline in his veins was a bit hard to differentiate from the beginnings of attraction. 

"No-"

"Go on, Longbottom. If you want to throw your weight around, say it like a man. Then we'll see what you're made of."

He'd inched forward, threateningly, close enough to smell the morning's exertion on him, close enough to see the shifting layer of muscle wrapped around shoulders. Neville's nerves jangled for something, and he very nearly didn't care what. 

"Let's start again," Neville said with a deep breath, like he might say to one of his students when failure got the best of them. "I'm just asking. Is there anything I can do to speed it up?"

Malfoy must have worked too long dodging the long arm of the law. He seemed permanently primed to defend himself. 

"What did you have in mind?"

"Anything legal," Neville amended. "The healers will be looking to find something wrong with it. I'm not asking you to break any rules for me."

Finally, Malfoy stood back. "I should hope not," he said, and went back to rubbing his shoulder. "I can ask. No guarantees. Is that all?"

It must have been the adrenaline rush from his closest brush with fist fighting in years that made Neville reckless. He felt shocked out of his ordinary sense of propriety.

He said, "What about lunch? There must be somewhere around here does a good pie and chips."

"No." 

The reply had come much too quickly. Neville left him a moment to rethink. 

"You've got a girlfriend objects to that sort of thing, have you?"

"That, Longbottom, is none of your business."

"What? A fit man like you with nothing to brag about? Come on."

Malfoy obliged him by illustrating the observation, hauling the top crate onto his shoulder and holding it snugly. 

"You paid for a set of magic dampening carpets. Not to take the piss. Keep your smart-arse comments to yourself."

He kicked the door open and went in.

"Too bad," Neville said after him. "I'm not taking it back."

Weaving through the stacks which already populated the room like stalagmites, Malfoy deposited the crate on the tiny desk shoved up against the far wall. 

Malfoy seemed to think that over. "Don't you have things to do? I thought you had your nose in everything from Hogwarts Board to the Dumbledore Foundation."

The way he asked said he knew exactly what sort of kids the Dumbledore Foundation worked with. "Just the ones that are important to me," Neville told him. 

Malfoy was leaning back against the desk, putting enough weight on his hands to make his abdominals show themselves under his shirt. The little room was crowded with piles of boxes and crates, some as tall as Malfoy himself, and in the small space between them, Malfoy seemed more substantial and commanding than before. There was a sheen of sweat inside the low curved neck of his shirt, and Neville longed to get his mouth on it. 

"Come on," Neville said. "A drink. Looks like thirsty work here."

"And you imagine these highly explosive crates are going to stack and catalogue themselves, do you?"

"You can get someone else-" It was partly Malfoy's face that told him, partly his own tardy conclusions. The illusion Malfoy projected of having a business was just that. There were no employees here. Only Malfoy, in a four-by-four office under the hole in the roof. "Oh. I see. Well there's always tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? And deprive the disciplinary board of the Department of International Magical Cooperation of my presence?" He might have had literal spines, the way he telegraphed returning aggression from every limb. "Get out, Longbottom. I've got work to do."

He had turned around to do something at the desk that seemed to involve moving orders from the bottom of the pile randomly to the top. 

"I said get out. Unless you want – oh, fuck it."

He grabbed Neville by the front of his shirt and walked him backwards right out through the warehouse door. Neville, who was by no means slight, put up just enough resistance to make him work for it. Outside, Neville grasped his wrist so that he had to pull his hand free. 

"See you later then," Neville said.

Malfoy didn't respond to his grin. He just strode back to his office with his comfortably muscular shoulders swinging, and collected the second crate in one smooth, exhibitionist scoop, as if perfectly aware that Neville had not stopped watching. 

**

The trouble with sleeping on problems was that it gave you a new perspective, and not always one you wanted to see. 

Neville had gone to bed naked with the idea of relaxing himself with a nice little fantasy involving tight shirts, flexing muscles and a large pile of crates. He had woken up still naked, unsatisfied, and horrified by the undeniable conclusion that, whatever he'd thought he'd been doing for the last six years, growing up had not been it.

All night, every promising line of thought had started with Malfoy's hands in his trousers and ended up with his grandmother saying in her most forbidding voice: "Novelty for its own sake is a selfish obsession of the young." And the shaking had started up again in his hands. He was angry, with a depth of fury that came from feeling powerless to change the outcome. He was too angry to turn it into arousal. So he lay there wondering what he might have found if he'd prised open some of the crates in Malfoy's little corner office, and what he'd been summonsed before the disciplinary board to explain, and eventually sleep claimed him again. 

The next day, after his 3pm appointment with Nadya ended with a fully formed illumination spell and the brightest smile he'd seen on her face in six months of lessons, he felt optimistic enough to change his shirt and go straight for the Floo. 

Coming along the side of the warehouse, Neville glanced at the bottle in his hand and thought that, at this hour of the afternoon, it didn't come across as a peace offering so much as a fairly unsubtle attempt to get cheap sex. Which was completely unfair, because he'd meant it as- Yeah, all right. The bottle did not lie. 

He found the warehouse locked, with no answer to his calls. But in the shadow of the massive old anchor that lay toppled at the end of the jetty, he thought he saw movement.

Malfoy looked more like his old self, with his hair neatly styled and professional robes that obscured his lovely arms. He was leaning back against the anchor's shaft, hands locked around his knees.

"How did your hearing go?" Neville asked. 

The shallow waves slapped and slid against the pylons underneath.

Finally, Malfoy said, "Your windows will be here day after tomorrow. I made some calls."

"Thanks."

He had the bottle clasped behind his back, waiting for a moment he could bring it out. 

"Malfoy? Not good then."

"What do you think? They were as bloody minded as ever and the fine was about five times what I can afford. I've spent the last two hours cancelling what orders I can. Some of my suppliers only have dead men for debtors."

If anything, he seemed more resigned than he had yesterday, as if the hearing had knocked some of the mettle out of him.

"Don't look like that," Malfoy said with a bit of his old sneer. "I didn't cancel your order. Yours was paid in advance."

He hadn't been thinking about his order. "Here." He held out the bottle. "You look like you need it."

He ought to have brought cups or something. But Malfoy simply swiped the bottle from his hand and twisted off the top in one easy gesture. 

"You should appeal," Neville said, watching the flex of Malfoy's wrist, then his throat, and finding himself a bit dry around the mouth. "If you get it to the Wizengamot, you'll get a fair hearing."

Malfoy choked on the drink. "That's no good, Longbottom. A fair hearing would convict me even quicker. I didn't say I was innocent, did I?" 

Neville couldn't think of any response but to hold out his hand for the bottle. The whiskey was old and mellow; the neck still wet when he put it to his lips.

"Innocent of what, by the way?"

"Lack of passion for paperwork." Malfoy slid a little down the side of the side of the anchor, easing his feet apart. "I was short a couple of licences on a shipment of potions ingredients – I would have got them easily enough but I had a temporary cashflow problem. When your suppliers are Russian giants with handlers in high places, you can't exactly object when the fuckers want to double the price on delivery."

Especially, Neville thought, if you were a wizard without a wand. He thought of the boat he had seen docked here the day before, and wondered exactly what sort of person was attracted to magical trade for a living. 

"This is your business though. Surely they have to understand, if they know how you work." 

He could see from Malfoy's glare how it must have been. They didn't know how he worked. Like Neville had, they pictured him snapping his fingers at a team of miserable workers to get the job done, and he kept as much from them as he could. He handed back the bottle. 

"Understanding isn't in the Ministry's dictionary. They win every round, Longbottom. They're the government, and every ally I've ever had is dead or doing time." He took a deep swig that must have hurt. After it, his words came out husky. "It's only a matter of time, but heaven help me, I'm not going to make this easy for them."

Had Malfoy needed to work up his courage to engage in a losing battle with the Ministry of Magic, or had his personality simply given him no choice? 

"There are other jobs."

"For people who with a criminal record and no NEWTS? There are two, and the other one's even more illegal than what I do here."

"Why didn't you go back?"

He hadn't forgotten what seventh year had been like for Malfoy, when the constant unfairness of the Carrows' administration had turned good kids into bullies and bullies into downright sadists, and Malfoy had been the one person out of favour with both sides.

"Lost my taste for education."

He'd drunk a lot, quickly, and was starting to slouch. Without his careful posture, the girth of his arms was straining the shoulders of his robes so that they looked dishevelled on him. Neville took back the bottle. "I noticed what you did that year, Longbottom." 

"I didn't do much."

He hadn't, either. Just talked to people like Seamus and Cormac when he'd seen them going more than two-on-one with any of the Slytherins. He remembered better than anyone what it was like to be the one.

Malfoy said, "I don't remember suffering any injuries at the end of your wand. That counts as a favour by comparison."

"Sure." Uncomfortable, Neville went to the side of the jetty, where the low tide crept around the deepest pylons, leaving a stretch of damp greyish sand behind them. It must have come round to knock-off time. Even the distant sounds of the Muggle wharves had faded away. It was that unreal stretch of time caught between afternoon and evening, and Neville saw what this business with his grandmother had made him lose sight of. Nothing was as big as it seemed. If Malfoy turned him down, it was only as dramatic as he let it become.

"I've never been on a wharf before," he mused. "Where's all the taverns and cute young sailors?

Malfoy gave a snort of a laugh, undoubtedly mocking but a bit heartfelt too. 

"Probably under the jetty. I believe it's traditional." 

That mocking note was still there. Neville had never been that good at the half-truths of flirting. His success, where he had had it, had come from patience, and from knowing how to make his pride flexible.

"Show me."

Malfoy tipped his head back against the anchor and closed his eyes. 

"Oh hell. Why not."

He offered his hand and Neville braced himself as he gave it a solid wrench to haul himself up. Neville had to steady him as he wavered a bit on his feet. 

There was a ladder that led down, two of its rungs broken right through. He watched Malfoy's forearms tense in their easy grip as he descended. The air was chilly in the shadow of the land wall, and even colder draughts rose up from the sand. The fancy heels on Neville's new boots sank in on every step. Under the pier it was rotten smelling, damp but not dark. It was only the strange, slatted light falling through the planks that gave it an atmosphere. That and the thought of what they were about to do with the splintered sea shells and swept-away drink cans all around them.

"Well, Longbottom? Is it everything you dreamed of?"

"Not yet," said Neville, and grasped the tie of Malfoy's robe to pull him in. 

He hadn't expected ambivalence from Malfoy and didn't get it. Malfoy kept moving forward until he got Neville backed up against a pylon and hooked one hand straight between his legs. Neville's cock responded instantly, so quickly it made his heart and lungs flutter to keep up. As his head thudded against the wood behind him, Malfoy kneaded him mercilessly, strong fingers making light work of the resistance of Neville's most flattering pair of jeans. 

"That's good," Neville groaned. "Keep going."

Malfoy immediately stopped. "Enjoy it while you can, Longbottom. I might just add it to your bill."

And then he flicked open Neville's jeans and raked his hands down his hips to get his pants out of the way. Neville's arousal jutted eagerly out, a few skin-in-skin strokes away from its fullest. With a murmur that sounded like approval, Malfoy took him in hand. 

Hands. Both of Malfoy's hands closed around him, fingers tight on the shaft while with the other palm he cupped Neville's balls so his fingers could push up behind them. Neville bucked forward helplessly into that overpowering grip. And Malfoy watched himself at work, looking down with his mouth half-open as if transfixed by the sight of Neville's cock squeezed in his fingers, getting dark and wet with pleasure. Neville could only hold onto his shoulders and follow the flex and clench that every stroke pulled them into, dragging them up to Malfoy's neck, pushing his robes aside to feel his gorgeous pectorals at work.

Malfoy's mouth was evasive: every time Neville bent his neck on an angle that might have accommodated a kiss, Malfoy moved shifted his face out of reach, or leaned in to breathe his halting breath into Neville's ear. A gull alighted on the sand and, meeting its curious gaze over Malfoy's shoulder, Neville felt a new surge of arousal at the recollection of where they were. The lust, yearning and satisfaction of past generations seemed to linger in the air here. He thought of six-month voyages under the threat of the lash or the noose, and the volcanic release of starving men meeting the shore-bound whores. 

He turned his face into Malfoy's neck and mouthed up the line of the tendon, biting gently into the muscle to stifle the groan in his throat. 

"Oh," was all Malfoy said, a wistful sort of sound.

As the first spasms of orgasm gripped him, his fingers clenched around Malfoy's shoulders, but already he was escaping Neville's grasp. He dropped down on one knee to get his mouth around it, sucking around his tight grip with obscene slurps of his tongue that drew Neville's pleasure out deeper and harder until he finished up on his toes, arched needily up into Malfoy's mouth and distantly aware that he'd been making far too much noise for a public location. 

Malfoy sat back on his heels, panting. His upturned eyes looked jarringly innocent, and bluer than he would have thought.

He wondered, for the first time, how long it had been for Malfoy.

"Come here," he said.

This time, Malfoy was accommodating, content to let Neville kiss the slick corners of his mouth, tasting the salt of them with the tip of his tongue.

Then he was using his considerable strength on Neville's shoulders, encouraging him down, and with one last penetrating kiss, Neville was on his knees. Driven by appetite, he made short work of Malfoy's trousers while Malfoy slipped his robes off into the sand. 

"More," Neville murmured, his lips nipping the clearly defined line of arousal under Malfoy's pants. "Shirt too."

Malfoy's laugh was a bit short on breath. "Have you forgotten where you are?"

"No." He ran his thumb up the same line and watched it swell for him. "No-one going to complain about the view."

"Get to work first. See if you can talk me into it."

Neville did. No playing around, he freed Malfoy's cock and swallowed it down generously. It had been ages since he'd done this, and never _this_ exactly – never with the water from the sand seeping into his knees, never openly visible to any craft that came near enough to the shoreline. 

"Well?" Neville said, tilting up so that the wet head caught his chin. 

Glazed eyes blinked down at him, then Malfoy's shirt hit the sand. He didn't need to see Malfoy's naked torso to know how inspiring the sight would be. Just the thought of it, unveiled and waiting for his attention, made him hungry.

"Yes-" Malfoy whispered, and, taking an even firmer grip on his hips, Neville obliged him. 

When he had finished, Malfoy was bent forward awkwardly, holding himself up on the pylon behind where Neville knelt. 

Neville slid to his feet and pulled Malfoy against him, and found him pliant and unsteady and warm. He traced the line of weak light that fell over Malfoy's shoulder from between the planks above. 

"Okay," Neville said. "There's a lot to be said for tradition."

He was fingering Malfoy's chest, a bit distracted, a bit helpless to stop his hand from doing it. He pressed his fingertips into the firm pectoral muscle, then pinched the nipple: stroked and pressed and pinched. Then between one breath and the next he was sucking the skin over Malfoy's collar-bone, licking the sweat off it.

"This is definitely going on the bill, Longbottom."

He kissed the side of Malfoy's neck and worked up towards his jaw. "Why don't you come home with me?" he murmured. "If you can't take any more deliveries today, you might as well."

"I don't do dinner dates," Malfoy said, though Neville could feel fingers tentatively brushing the back of his head. 

Neville kissed his mouth and stepped back to tidy himself up. "Who said anything about eating?" He grinned, he couldn't help that either. "Come on. I'll wait for you up there."

There, Neville thought as he climbed the ladder. Sometimes it was just a matter of persisting in what you wanted. He could do that. 

**

Neville checked himself in the hall mirror, to make sure he looked the part for the healers and for his grandmother. The late night laying the last of the carpets didn't show in his face, or at least not much. 

Through the open bedroom door, Malfoy lay sprawled on his front over a pillow. It made Neville feel a bit warm to know he was sleeping there, and most likely would still be there when Neville returned with his mother's future decided one way or another. Children brought the strangest things back from the seaside: smooth ground glass and scraps of mother-of-pearl and shimmering little pebbles that lost their sparkle when they dried. Malfoy had come to him like a seaside curio, too, brought back in his pocket and unexpectedly hard to part with. 

Maybe he would be a charm, bringing Neville the touch of luck he needed to pull off the impossible. Neville pulled the front door closed behind him. He was ready.

**


	18. What happens in Barcelona

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where Draco moves to Barcelona to become a Quidditch star (Harry/Draco)

It took a stretch of the imagination, or at least a whimsical grasp of geography, to believe that Barcelona might be en route to Harry's surveillance conference in Brussels. But he had the weekend free and the London weather was the sort of rotten that actually made you sit up and take notice, and the Basiliscos were just coming off a home game which had pretty much guaranteed them the All-Europe Winter Cup.

In the bar of the second hotel he tried, lounging on a burgundy leather bench seat with his shin propped up against the table and his hands mobile in the air describing something that could have been a Wronski feint from yesterday's victory or the culmination of an all-night orgy, was the Basiliscos' captain and Seeker. He looked like Harry remembered him from last time they'd met, only better, because this time he was dressed and decent and stuck in the middle of a large group of admirers, from which it was going to be a pleasant sort of challenge to extract him.

The pint at Malfoy's elbow was hardly touched, and as Harry started to pick his way through the tables, he continued his anecdote with the same animation. There was a crowd of nearly ten at the table – a couple of them could have been from the junior squad and the rest, judging by their very particular nonchalance, were fans. As Harry approached, he could make out a new scar on Malfoy's jaw, just to the right of his chin, that looked like a close encounter with a Bludger. The sprawl of his wiry body shouldn't have been so easy for a man in his middle twenties. He looked good. Harry stepped behind the chair of one of the group, because his mind was already filling with the sort of memories it was best not to dwell on in public.

Malfoy looked up brightly, still wearing the cockiness of yesterday's victory. "Harry. Que tal? Sientate. Quieres beber algo?"

That shouldn't have been a shock to find that the conversation was being conducted in Spanish. It was two or three years since Malfoy had moved here, and it had never been his style to downplay something he did well. It was, he had to admit, more than a bit hot. 

Harry only knew two Spanish phrases, both of which had been taught to him by Charlie Weasley one summer holiday. He got a laugh when he said one of them. 

"I always suspected as much," Malfoy smirked . "Though I don't know where you'll find a skrewt at this time of night, and certainly not one that's trained for that. I'll have a gin and elderflower. Double. Make sure they don't go overboard with the ice."   
Harry used the other expression Charlie had taught him, but went to get the drink anyway. 

At the bar, he picked up a coaster with a picture of a black phoenix and tried to puzzle out the foreign slogan. Fuego. He'd been pretty confident that Malfoy would be glad to see him, but really what was that confidence based on except a few short and dirty encounters that were three months old now, and the fact that Harry hadn't been able to get them out of his mind. At a meeting in Amsterdam, he'd chanced to stay at the hotel the Basiliscos favoured on tour. Like many travellers, he seemed to have left his common sense at home. Between hardly more than a few dozen spoken words and not nearly enough drinks to explain it away, he'd found himself stumbling into an empty store-room with Malfoy's hand already in his pants and his own hands undressing Malfoy with no greater finesse. Twice this had happened, a frenzy of grasping and tugging and explosive relief, and after that a brutally quick exchange of blow jobs in the emergency staircase that still dominated his late-night fantasies: the rail sticking into his back, the sounds of sucking and panting magnified indecently by the tall space, and Malfoy on his knees with his eyes closed and his white knuckles hooked in Harry's underpants.

By the time he got back with a drink that looked right, Malfoy was alone at the table. Two of the women from the group had moved to the corner, pointedly absorbed in their own loud conversation. Everyone else had vanished. As simply as that, Malfoy had staked his claim. He glanced at the collar of Malfoy's shirt and started to imagine himself taking it off him. 

"You've got business in the city, have you?" Malfoy said.

"Not really."

Malfoy gave his drink a cautious sniff and knocked it back in one go. "Well now you do."

He wouldn't say that Malfoy was the best sex he'd ever had. There had been too much missing for it to rate that highly. But the sort of sex he'd had with Malfoy, he'd never had with anybody else, and the tightness in his pants was telling him how much he craved it. 

Malfoy said, "Come on then." And with that, drinks abandoned, they were hurrying through the maze of laneways, through thinning crowds. Once again, distracted by the fantasy of Malfoy's wet mouth, Harry almost lost sight of the quiffed white head and faded khaki t-shirt. There he was. Stopped outside a modern door set in a gothic stone archway, unfolding the jacket from his arm and rifling through the pocket.

It seemed unlikely – they were just short of the gateway to the magical district. "Here?"

"Unless you'd rather fuck me in the street," Malfoy said crisply over his shoulder.

That was the moment when Harry's sense of proportion deserted him for good. Because he found that yes, he would, and he couldn't wait a second longer to do it. Malfoy swore at the sudden clutch of Harry's hands around his waist. His shirt was slutty – thin enough to feel every contour underneath. Tempted beyond endurance, Harry reached down between Malfoy's legs, finding what he wanted almost instantly. 

"Fine by me." His voice was so rough he barely recognised it. "Not much different from the back stairs of the Imperial, I'd say."

Malfoy was trying to get his key into the lock. It rattled hopelessly.

"Fucking hell – you've waited this long to get here. Can't you keep your hands off me one more minute?"

He was still jiggling the key, and Harry wasn't sure how hard he was really trying to turn it. Mostly, he just seemed to be writhing into Harry's hands, looking for a more brutal grip. Harry gave it to him, grinding his growing frustration into Malfoy's rear.

"One minute, Potter," he gasped. "One fucking minute, you can have me against the back of the door."

That image struck him like a blow to the head. Before he could recover himself, Malfoy had slithered out of his grasp and wrested the door open. He darted away, skimming up the stairs three at a time, leaving Harry to follow.

On the third floor, he let Harry catch him. Slammed against the wall, panting, he gave as good as he got, too. Guiding Harry's hand firmly onto his arse, he snapped open the buttons on Harry's shirt and ran his palms over the naked skin underneath, watching with his eyes slitted and his mouth open hungrily. And yet through all this he managed to look, as he had in Amsterdam, as if this could be the culmination of an intricate and carefully executed plan.

Harry had no plan, short of a desperate need to get rid of the ache in his balls that had been three months building. He wasn't even sure what he wanted to do to Malfoy first, except for everything. 

In the wall to their left, a door clicked opened with a breathless spell. 

"Come on, Potter," Malfoy smirked at him. "This is what you wanted." 

Inside the apartment, Harry had an instant to take in an impression of dark wood and low ceilings before a jar was shoved into his hand and Malfoy was literally making good on his promise. Throwing the door closed, he leaned back against it. The jangle of his belt buckle was, right then, the most erotic sound Harry's imagination could supply.

"Don't let me down."

Harry couldn't wait to wipe that smirk off his face. As Malfoy turned around, his trousers slipped straight down to his ankles, exposing long legs that drew the eye upwards to his neat, spare, naked arse. It was more of him than Harry had ever seen naked before, but all the same it was very far from enough. With a single-mindedness usually reserved for moments of mortal peril, Harry had the jar unfastened, his fingers slicked and two of them sliding down Malfoy's crease, finding the point of least resistance and punishing it. 

Malfoy clutched his forearm hard enough to gouge marks, but his voice was an unashamed groan of encouragement. Puzzling how Malfoy, who worked in a world of fit young men with stamina, leisure and few moral ties, hadn't already had his fill of this. The way his free hand was clawing at the plaster, you'd think he was starved for it. He bent forward to nip at Malfoy's neck as he prised him open, matching him pant for pant, groan for groan. 

The muscle clenched tightly around his two fingers, and he was still getting some resistance when Malfoy tore off his t-shirt and cast it away. Along with it went the last of Harry's self-control. His shoulder was soft under Harry's teeth, pliant skin over match-hardened muscle, masculine, flexing, and the smell of sex seemed to ooze from every pore on him. Grasping his cock, he slicked it with the last of the lube from his hand – enough by itself to leave him as hard as he'd ever been. Then he pulled Malfoys hips towards him, lined himself up and shoved his way in.

"I can stop if you-"

"No!" Malfoy's face was screwed up, teeth clenched as if every inch was causing him pain. "I bloody well wouldn't."

A slow thrust made him press his forehead into the wall with a faint, high sound of distress that broke into a low murmur of pleasure. "Yes," he hissed. "For fuck's sake, Potter – yes."

He'd heard Malfoy sneering and filthy before – he never seemed shut up, even with Harry's come dripping from the corner of his mouth – but these needy commands were something new. Harry, who'd come three hundred miles for this, wanted him even more badly than he'd imagined. Fingers closing like claws around Malfoy's bony hips, he tried to keep it slow. A deep, brutal thrust and a lingering withdrawal that guaranteed Malfoy felt every last inch that was rammed up inside him. He held back as long as he could. Driving Malfoy crazy, driving himself crazy. But then Malfoy, fettered by his trousers, did his best to slide one knee up the wall and open himself up, and that invitation was too much to resist. 

He hooked one arm around Malfoy's midriff, steadied his hips with the other, and hammered him. Deep enough that his pelvic bone dug into the firm muscle of Malfoy's arse cheeks. Messy enough that every stroke was punctuated with the wet slap of penetration. Fast and ugly and rough enough that Malfoy's goading shattered into tremulous, animal sounds. He pulled Malfoy hard against him. Harry was hardly the sturdiest of the Aurors, but a professional Seeker required slender flexibiity and Malfoy was nothing if not competitive. Despite the breadth of his shoulders, he felt pliant in Harry's arms, lapping it up even as his tailbone unconsciously tried to twist away from the onslaught. 

Harry's thighs were quaking as the first tremors of orgasm flitted up his groin. Malfoy had gone silent, gasping, forehead on one arm against the wall as he left his body to Harry's abuse. Gentleness was a long-forgotten relic as Mafloy's passage surrendered to him, hot and slick and clutching. Harry jerked up into him, right to the root, and that was it. His cock pulsed in the slack depths of Malfoy's arse, pleasure bursting through him, his arm cinching the sweaty skin of Malfoy's waist as his vision turned into a silvery grey glimmer and he sank his teeth into Malfoy's shoulder one last time. 

The back of the door was holding them both up as he collapsed. Then slowly, sensation came back to him. The slick of Malfoy's back against his chest. The tug of his cock, softening, still sheathed in flesh, slipping free. The tickle of hair against his cheek and the slippery tendons of Malfoy's neck flexing under his mouth. A drop of sweat slid out of Malfoy's hair and bled over Harry's lip.

He loosened his violent grip. He had to swallow a couple of times to lubricate his throat. "Turn around."

Shakily, Malfoy did, revealing the ruined remains of his careful hairstyle and a stunned, swollen-lipped expression that made Harry long to fuck him again straight away. Harry's attention descended to the stout, inflamed arousal that had fitted so tastily in his mouth those months ago. It was unsatisfied, in spite of the pounding Harry had just administered, with a glistening trickle dripping from the head. Harry dropped on one knee, tilted it between thumb and finger. A light thatch of hair grew above it, but his balls and the whole underside were kept smooth and bare, something there had never been time to notice before. When there was less urgency, Harry was going to find out how it felt under his mouth. But now, hips grinding into Harry's light grip, Malfoy's cock was recovering its stiffness.

"Go on," Harry murmured, releasing him. "Make yourself come." 

There was something perverted and hot about making him do it himself while Harry knelt in front of him and watched. Malfoy's hand closed around his length, obscuring everything except the dark pink dome of the head. He tugged, hard and tight, getting faster. And Harry watched. Drank in the merciless squeeze of Malfoy's fingers, the lovely defined muscle of his forearm and wrist, the flush of blood growing in the tip of his cock. At the last minute, lust overcame him. As Malfoy's head rolled back with the first clench of orgasm, Harry seized his hand, slid his broader fingers over Malfoy's, put the spurting cockhead to his mouth and licked and sucked and swallowed until Malfoy's grip went slack and the last of his pleasure was drained out of him. 

His body felt like he'd fought a troll, even though it couldn't be more than twenty minutes since he'd first laid eyes on Malfoy. 

When he drew himself unsteadily to his feet, Malfoy's eyes flickered open. His smile was greedy and edged. He straightened Harry's glasses and tucked Harry's cock back into his pants, where it felt greasy and dirty and already half-awake as Malfoy fastened the buttons and the belt. 

Leaving his pile of shed clothing, Malfoy stepped away from the door to open it. 

"Thank you, Potter," he smirked. "Do come again."

As he stumbled out into the harsh light of the stairwell, it occurred dizzily to Harry that all he'd seen of Malfoy's private world was the back of his door. His last impression as it closed behind him was of Malfoy standing in the sliver of light, wearing nothing but his boots, watching him intently and raising his sticky fingers to put them in his mouth. 

**

It felt like days between the sudden disappearance of Malfoy's voice from the intercom and the buzz of the door unlatching, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes. Harry wondered what he'd needed the delay for. A few promising possibilities occurred to him as he climbed the stairs, slipping off his jacket.

The apartment immediately confirmed his wildest hopes. Curtains and blinds drawn to block the early evening light, the room was lit with a couple of low lamps, throwing a smoky glow over Malfoy, who was lying back on the couch when Harry came in, one bare foot crossed in the air, and his shirt riding up his waist. 

"I'm not the only attraction in Barcelona, you know." His contrived pose belied the indifference in his voice – as if he thought he needed to make Harry want him. "I'm sure I can direct you to a cathedral or a gallery if you can't see to your own entertainment."

Everything about him said come hither, so Harry came. He shifted to let Harry perch on the edge of the couch by his hip. "I didn't come here for the culture."

When he reached for Malfoy's crotch, a reproachful hand knocked his away. "Expecting a repeat performance, are you? Too bad. I'd have to be mad to take that two nights in a row. I'm only flesh and blood – and more than I'd like of the latter this morning."

Harry recalled the blissful expression Malfoy had worn last night and quelled the urge to apologise. "If I remember it right from Amsterdam, you've got a few other tricks up your sleeve."

Malfoy looked pretty pleased with himself as he sat up. "And you want to see some more of them I suppose."

The way he said it brought to mind a repertoire like a gay karma sutra with spellwork in the mix, and for a fraction of a second Harry, haunted as he always had been by the recollection of Rita Skeeter's subterfuge and the constant attention of the gossip columns, hesitated. Then Malfoy, sliding to his feet, grimaced.

"I did hurt you." He touched Malfoy's lower back, as if that could help. "You should have said."

Half-turned, Malfoy studied him, wearing a very odd expression, and Harry wondered whether he'd over-stepped some subtle point of gay protocol that Malfoy's broader experience had taught him.

"Come through." 

The messiness of Malfoy's bedroom reminded him that he was coming off a big victory and, probably, a long celebration. Strewn clothes, a plate with toast crusts, a bunch of formerly red roses askew in a coffee cup. Nothing that gave him a clue about what Malfoy had in mind. It smelled like it could do with an airing, and like it belonged to a man who had a healthy libido. 

Malfoy was standing in front of the open bottom drawer of a wardrobe. It was the longest time they'd spent together without their hands on each other, and Harry wasn't sure what to do with it. Then Malfoy bent at the waist – Harry's groin responded appropriately to the visual – and groped around in the drawer. As he stood, Harry glimpsed a silver set of handcuffs, from which he heard the clank of the keys being removed. 

With his back still turned, Malfoy tossed the keys into the far corner of the room, stripped off his shirt, stepped out of his trousers, and calmly cuffed his hands behind his back. 

Foremost among Harry's jumbled and panic-stricken thoughts was that he was finally seeing Malfoy wholly naked, and the vision was almost exactly what Harry's many fantasies had imagined. A straight, sparse build, defined by lean muscle cladding his long bones from his knees to his buttocks, and his waist broadening slightly into athletic shoulders on an angle that seemed to strike Harry's cock as aesthetic perfection. 

Harry came up behind him, reluctant to speed things up by touching him, and looked into the drawer. There was an array of objects – among them a whip, a black blindfold, and various lengths of rope – only some of whose purposes Harry could guess. He felt like an amateur. 

"You do this a lot then." 

Malfoy tensed beside him, as if in second thoughts. "Once," he said in a tone that did not invite questions. 

Hooking his ankle into a coil of rope, Malfoy shifted to the foot of his bed and slipped his cuffed hands over the navel-high bedpost. "Yes or no, Potter? I don't have all day."

Despite his misgivings, it had taken three months of overblown fantasies and disappointing back-room substitutes to get him here, and he was not going to walk away. "Nothing too rough."

Malfoy swallowed – the ripple of his throat, like every flex of muscle from his toes up to his forehead, showed plainly. 

"I think that's up to you now."

There was an amused sort of twist to his mouth but he's lost the sultry ease he'd begun with.

Harry slipped the rope from under his foot, banishing the momentary temptation to tie him down and fuck him to the limits of both their endurance. The bitter disappointment of last night was fresh in his memory, wandering through the laneways in search of a hotel and cursing himself for coming so far for a culmination that had lasted barely longer than it took to make a cup of tea. No, this time he was going to take it slower. 

He fastened the rope securely around the bedpost then looped it around the chain of Malfoy's cuffs, pulling tight. It wasn't incapacitating. Malfoy could do pretty much anything he wanted to that didn't involve his hands. He stepped back to watch Malfoy flexing his shoulders to test the restraints.

"Okay?"

That elusive amusement was back. "I'm hoping for a little more than a demonstration of your skills in knot-work."

Fully clothed and standing in front of a bound man, Harry shouldn't have felt out of his depth. It wasn't as if he was new to sex, or men. But with adulthood, and the burdens of captaincy and fame, and the worldliness of living abroad, Malfoy had lost his brittle teenaged overcompensation. He had grown into his sense of superiority. Right now, he was looking at Harry like he must have looked at a B-grade Chaser who wasn't yet ready for a chance in the top squad. 

Malfoy glared suspiciously at the blindfold but didn't say anything as Harry tied it on him and brushed his forehead to pull the hair out from underneath it. Harry could feel how tense it made him, clearly vulnerable, and really, what guarantee was there that Harry didn't have years of pent-up bitterness he was keen to take out through his fists? In the face of his complete inexperience, how could he even be certain, himself, that he could stay under control? 

He was just about to take it off again when Malfoy leaned forward and found his jaw and turned his head to bite it gently. That was when the potential of it hit him with a jerk between his legs. The little things he could do, the limitless things he could make Malfoy do, and the thrill of having all his fantasies at his fingertips, if he wanted them. He had enough possibilities in his hands that there would be no temptation to descend to unpleasantness. He raised a hand to squeeze Malfoy's shoulder and the touch seemed to steady them both.

"Well, Potter?" Malfoy murmured – another tone again, this time a bit breathless. "What perverted things have you dreamed about doing to me?"

Suddenly, Harry could only think of one thing. The black silk changed the whole cast of Malfoy's face. Without his piercing, pale eyes to dominate, you could appreciate the slight uptilt at the bottom of his nose, or his small, even, lower teeth. His lips, in contrast to the bony angles of the rest of him, looked tender and inviting. Harry had never kissed him before. 

Even the act of taking Malfoy's jaw between his hands was erotic, charged with the knowledge of complete freedom to do it. He tilted Malfoy's face to get an angle that suited him, took the plumper bottom lip between his teeth and bit it. The warm flesh slid back through his teeth. He waited till Malfoy had let his held breath out, then he did it again, slower, lingering. The muscle under his hand trembled. 

Why not? He prised Malfoy's mouth open and thrust his tongue inside. Malfoy made a deliciously conflicted noise in the back of his throat and opened up for more. Harry guessed it was frustrating him more than he had expected to be deprived of the use of his hands. The greedy strokes of his tongue suggested he'd like to have the back of Harry's neck firmly wedged in the crook of his elbow, where he could play with the pace of the kiss. Instead, he could only give himself up to Harry's pleasure. 

Even through a layer of cloth, he felt the shocking heat of Malfoy's erection brush his thigh. He shuddered, broke the messy kiss. A single glance told him he was right – Malfoy was getting off on this, on nothing but a kiss, on sheer helplessness. The drawer he had looked in must be full of long-suppressed fantasies and risks he had so far lacked the courage to take. Harry kissed him again, plunging and dirty and deep, until the jab against his thigh grew painful. 

Malfoy's mouth looked wanton. Swollen and slick and ready for abuse. Harry was only human, and he had highly specific memories of what that mouth could do. 

"Go on."

He'd barely touched Malfoy's shoulder before he was sinking to his knees. The bindings forced his shoulders forward on a strained angle, but that suited Harry's purposes. He fumbled his belt open and shoved his clothes unceremoniously down his thighs.

Malfoy seemed both eager and vulnerable, with his head tilted slightly and his lips parted, waiting blindly for Harry to decide what would happen next. With Malfoy's damp breath bathing him, he had to fight to make himself stop. Closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths. Some people tried to lose themselves in sex, but to Harry, what people said and did in the bedroom was very often truer than when they had clothes to hide behind. The sort of person he thought he was wouldn't do the things that he was desperately tempted to do to Malfoy just now. 

"Potter?" 

The muscle under Malfoy's naked skin was as readable as paper; he grew wary. It skewed the lovely languid lines that his body, in pleasure, had bent into. Harry let go of his dick and bent down to kiss him. 

Malfoy spat him away crossly. "I thought we were done with that."

They were done when Harry said they were done, but he couldn't think of a way to express it that didn't make him sound like someone he despised. He took Malfoy's jaw gently in hand. Malfoy pushed forward. 

"No," Harry said, watching himself give a needy twitch very near Malfoy's top lip. "When I say." 

With a slow, restrained exhale, Malfoy licked his lips and stilled himself. That was better. At least, Harry thought so. He'd cringed all the way through that one night with Percy's friend who'd punctuated every twinge of pleasure with "Oh yeah!" or "Give it to me!", but right now he wouldn't have minded a bit of vocal reassurance. He'd felt Malfoy's desire before. The foundations of Malfoy's fame were cool control and unflappable authority - and last night the trembling in those foundations had reverberated right through Harry's bones. Harry wanted so badly to watch him lose it. 

"Go on then." 

Even as they opened up to swallow him, Malfoy's lips managed to twist into a smirk. He drew Harry's cock into his mouth, absorbing it against his soft tongue so that the texture of taste buds caressed its ultra-sensitive crown. With a few gentle tugs around the ridge of its head, he curled his lips slightly under and sank down, and Harry had never imagined the world could contain such a pornographic sight as the Basiliscos' smart-mouthed captain with his eyes bound in black and the not inconsiderable girth of Harry's cock stretching his jaw wide open. 

Under the black silk, his eyelids were fluttering as he sucked, getting lower down, throat straining to make room for more. His memory from Amsterdam hadn't been exaggerating – Malfoy was more than just good at this. 

Harry told him so. For a sickening moment, it looked as if he might stop sucking to tell Harry to fuck off with the sweet talk, or to agree, or even to say thank you. Instead there was just a languorous lessening of pace, a slow hollowing of his cheeks, a dizzying increase in suction and – And then Malfoy started to suck like he could draw an orgasm up from Harry's balls by sheer force. He sucked like he had some sort of grudge against his own gag reflex. He sucked like he wanted nothing more in life than a throat full of cock. And Malfoy was a man who usually got what he wanted. 

There was no chance of holding out against that sort of hunger. Harry squeezed his eyes shut to the image of Malfoy's shoulders straining in their bindings to let him sink further forward onto Harry's cock, and dug his fingers into the heels of his hands where he could be sure they would do the least damage as a shockingly hard orgasm ripped its way out of him. He came and came, surrendering to a force more powerful than himself.

Later, he followed the temptation downwards as it left him, sinking on one knee. Dragging in wheezing breaths, chest pumping like bellows, muscles in his lips and jaw clearly shaking, Malfoy's mouth was the reddest, lushest sight Harry had ever fantasised. 

"Satisfactory then?" Malfoy said, smugger than ever, but his voice was shredded and he was coughing before the words were fully out. 

Harry felt so empty he might never come again. But if that had to be his last orgasm, he couldn't have asked for a better one. 

"A bit too quick to say," Harry said, and thumbed away the trickle sliding down Malfoy's chin. "You can have another try later. Stand up."

The hesitation across Malfoy's chest said he wasn't sure if he could. Harry helped him. Malfoy's shoulders flexed as Harry's hands ran over them, rubbing out the strain. Once he'd started touching, it was hard to stop. Malfoy's upper chest was beautifully built from his years of training, the lean muscles subtly defined, and Harry appreciated them with every inch of his palms, dragging them back and forth over aroused pectorals and textured abdominals. Skin so soft that it must rarely see daylight, that same silky feel that had undone him last night, but over it ran the diagonal scars that a younger, stupider Harry had put there.

His fingers followed one of the lines.

"Get on with it." 

The command had a slight edge of doubt that Harry was not used to, as if he might have unexpectedly lost the knack of giving orders. It was so unlike the Malfoy of his youth, and even the brazen Malfoy who had manhandled him into a stairwell in Amsterdam, that his skin prickled with the heady thrill of having a new man for the first time. 

Harry reached down and cupped Malfoy's balls in his hand, gently. "You don't want it over so quickly. Do you?"

Thighs shifting slightly apart, Malfoy only rubbed against his hand, head turning away.

If Harry knew one thing about power and control, it's that you only had to wield it lightly to demonstrate that you had it. Overt displays of might only reflected badly on the instigator. He had tried his best, as boy hero and as Auror, to deal out justice, never humiliation. Malfoy knew that Harry could do anything to him, anything he liked. Harry knew that he couldn't. 

He could not explain the urge to do this slowly, except that once or twice already he'd felt how slenderly Malfoy was hanging on to his self-control. Harry wanted to see him come undone, like he had last night, only this time he wanted to see it in slow motion, right in front of his eyes. 

Keeping his gentle grip, he went back for another taste of Malfoy's mouth, slipping from his teeth to his lips then down onto his jaw, which was such a beautiful fit he had to bite. Malfoy's cock twitched in his palm as Harry squeezed his balls, pushing them up into his body. As he moved down, biting hard into the muscle of Malfoy's neck, the rocking against his hand got faster, the breaths in Malfoy's throat got choked, and there was no mistaking the bursting erection that prodded his arm. 

Far too soon for this to be over. Harry let go, and understood from Malfoy's snarling grimace that he'd done it just in time, or a couple of seconds too early, depending on point of view. Harry's point of view was that he'd spent last night in a scratchy, cheap, cold, creaking hotel bed, plagued by the image of Malfoy's cock, flushed and wet, a few inches in front of his face. 

He got down on one knee and turned his fantasy into reality.

Malfoy's shaft stood upright, straining, darkened with blood at the head. It wasn't long. It was a perfect, fat mouthful that a man could suck on all night and still want more. Harry wanted it. He watched as a creamy drop slid out from his engorged slit, clung to the rim of the head, lengthened, and fell. Harry caught it on his fingers and put it in his mouth.

"If you only want to look, you can buy Witch Weekly like everybody else." 

He said it through a stiff jaw, like he was struggling to keep it nonchalant. All Harry could think was what this particular picture – the victorious captain with his hands shackled, chest glistening, cock begging for attention – would do for the magazine's sales. 

"The view's not bad," Harry murmured, letting him wait, and noting that the delay didn't seem to be diminishing his arousal by a single degree. 

Malfoy's gulp made the shallow muscles ripple down to the top of his chest. 

The mental connection happened as quick as looking back down. He understood why Malfoy kept himself smooth beneath the neat dark blond thatch at the base of his groin. He pressed the needy shaft back against Malfoy's belly and licked his balls with the shameless flat of his tongue. Malfoy made a strangled sound very deep in his chest, and kept making it, over and over, as Harry licked harder and faster, and sucked first one tight ball then the other between his lips. And over that, for the first time, he heard the rattle of the cuff chain as Malfoy unconsciously struggled to get his hands free. Pretty soon, the jangle was continuous, and Malfoy's panting had a moaning sort of note in it, as Harry went on nibbling and sucking the tenderest place on Malfoy's body and filled his mouth with the taste of him. 

"Potter, fuck-"

Head thrown back, body strung tight from thighs to shoulders, Malfoy in need was too much for Harry's self-control. He grabbed those bony hips and sucked his cock into his mouth. Just as he remembered. Thick against his soft palate, thick between his lips, butting perfectly at the top of his throat with that trimmed golden hair tickling his nostrils. The smell of him, the taste of him – either there was some unique magical ingredient in Malfoy's come, or their history had inextricably associated that taste with the sort of sex that left his ears ringing. 

The jangling stopped. Malfoy arched out and up, rising on his toes. 

"No!"

Harry jerked his mouth off him. In spite of everything that had been done to make him helpless, Malfoy looked as if he were about to take him apart, limb by limb. And Harry, on his knees, felt an inexplicable shiver of excitement at the thought. His bones cracked as he stood up.

"There's an etiquette here, Potter." Malfoy's lips drew back, showing teeth, spitting. "I might have known you'd have no fucking idea of how to go about it." 

The uncontrolled venom said he was genuinely upset, and perhaps regretting the risk he had taken. Harry found he didn't like that thought at all.

"Sorry." He'd hoped he had reached an age where he was not going to have to say that word during sex anymore; trust Malfoy to make him feel seventeen again. He wrapped his hand around the side of Malfoy's neck and massaged it in a way he always found calming. "Whatever you want. Do you want me to untie you?"

He knew instantly that had been the wrong thing to say.

"What I want," Malfoy replied, flushed around the cheeks and obviously glaring despite the blindfold, "should be abundantly obvious to the greenest fucking novice in the country."

His beautifully eager erection was softening, even though Harry's tongue was still slick with the taste of it. Harry had never had bad sex with Malfoy. It hit him hard to realise how badly he did not want to start now.

"Okay, I get it."

Improvising quickly, he sat down on end of the bed, his leg right up against the post that secured the rope. The knots were tight, but a forceful jerk rotated them so he could bring Malfoy around to sit across his knees, bound wrists pressed between his back and the bedpost. When he parted his thighs, Malfoy's soles came off the floor. His irritation vanished in a single sharp breath as Harry's hand closed around its target.

It took a few seconds for the heat from Malfoy's thighs to bleed through a layer of denim. He could feel every squirm and every clench of muscle, and the gap in contact where Malfoy's cheeks parted. Harry rubbed him lightly and bit his shoulder. 

It had happened again – arousal had shut Malfoy right up, as if the tone of his voice gave away too much, or as if he didn't want to mar his smooth-tongued reputation with the clumsy requests that the distraction of sex let out.

"Tell me what you want," Harry murmured. 

He got a snort for an answer, and remembered that it still gave him a moment's shock, after years of intermittent experience, to hear himself tell another man to touch his cock. 

"Say it in Spanish if you like."

There was no mockery this time. After a pause, Malfoy's voice started up, low and slow and close to his ear, as he smeared his fingers in the accumulated leakage from Malfoy's cock and squeezed it in a good, firm grip. A few rough jerks and Malfoy's voice went up, in pitch and in pace, letting out a stream of garbled instructions. Harry knew the word for please and didn't hear it. He knew the word for bastard and did. 

A quiver was beginning in Malfoy's strained arms, his neck was sagging, bringing his forehead against Harry's temple where his words turned into damp whispers as Harry stroked him and stroked him.   
"-rapido y bruto y - you fucking stop now and I'll-"

Not a chance. One more stroke and Malfoy was coming, wracked with an orgasm more complete than Harry had seen before. The tight clench of his thighs and arse communicated right through Harry's jeans. His cock pulsed in Harry's fingers, shooting an obscenely high, thin jet of semen, and his back and neck went rigid. The shudders ran palpably through him as Harry watched the pleasure keep bursting out of him, splattering down onto his stomach, his leg, dripping down onto Harry's jeans. 

Their recovering panting fell in time, then out again. As the fog of lust drifted off him, he realised he was tired, and sore, and Malfoy was most likely in a much worse state. When he summoned the keys and let him loose, Malfoy's liberated hands reached toward the blindfold, then hesitated, and rubbed the chafed but unbroken skin around his wrists instead. It was Harry who got his finger under the band of silk and slipped it off. 

With a moment's squinting into the low light, Malfoy slipped straight off Harry's lap and onto the bed. The way he plumped up his pillows and lay back, like a sultan with a harem of one, was a complete contradiction of the helplessness he'd just shrugged off. 

"What's that look for?" he scoffed, semen-slicked and scruffy but still aiming for superiority. "Don't tell me you're curious yourself?"

He glanced from the empty cuffs to the bulge in Harry's jeans that all of Malfoy's squirming had stoked up. Harry pushed aside the odd mix of horror and excitement that the insinuation inspired. Whatever Malfoy's new mood meant, he did not want it to mean that the evening was over. 

"I thought you were going to show me all of your tricks." 

"Was I?"

Harry met his indolent expression with determination. "Or you can show me the same one again, if you'd rather."

As he ruffled the sweat-matted hair off his face, it was pretty clear that Malfoy was smiling to himself. 

"Oh yes? There's vodka in the kitchen. I'll need a drink." 

He planted his foot on Harry's back and nudged him off the bed, where he reclined like an open invitation and wrapped the black silk idly around the fingers of one hand. He looked up darkly. "And so will you."

Harry could think of a dozen excuses to miss the Brussels conference. He only needed one. 

**

When did familiarity become belonging? Was there a point where the grip of affection grew unbreakable, like a screw too rusted to spin free of its hold? How did a man know when the moment was upon him? 

Harry didn't care to count the number of times he had climbed these stairs now, since the first night he'd had Draco against the back of the door and gone away with his thighs still quaking and his appetite the very opposite of satisfied. There was a spot in the crook of the banister where he put his hand as he rounded each landing up to the third floor. It must almost have had the shape of his fingers worn into it by now. 

It was one of those days when the first inkling of desire was stirring in him already – had been stirring since he'd packed his bag this morning. And Malfoy might not even be home. Harry was an hour early. If he'd been a bit less impatient and a bit more concerned about courtesy, he might have found a cafe to sit in for a bit.

As it was ... He couldn't really explain the urge to do it this way, except that he had a job that required him to breach people's privacy all the time. It was as automatic a gesture as tying a shoelace or picking up a quill. The Muggle lock opened for him with hardly more than a thought, and Malfoy's wards had been idly set. He slid his pocket mirror under the door and used the reflective surface to get in behind them.

It was only as he eased the door closed that he asked himself what he was going to do if he found Malfoy finishing off a lazy afternoon shag to fill in the time before dinner with Harry. It wasn't as if Harry had any status to object. And it wouldn't help that Malfoy would probably only groan extravagantly and say something flippant about Harry's timing, barely even breaking his rhythm. 

He put his bag down carefully on the rug. In the quiet of his held breath, there was a sound from the far end of the hallway. A liquid sort of sound. Not, he thought, the sound of a rival.

Still, he walked on the rug to muffle his footsteps as he approached. That was another thing he couldn't justify. Wanting the chance to catch Malfoy unaware. To answer the thought that, even though he'd seen Malfoy stripped as naked as a man could get, there was still some hidden aspect of him that Harry was kept from.

The bathroom that led off to the right at the end of the hall was quite generous, more than just the impression of space that came from the high ceilings throughout the flat. Among the slate and neat silver and the grey marble counter, Malfoy's bare back stood out. Harry paused with the greeting stuck on his lips, and drew back to where the angle of the doorway shielded him from Malfoy's reflection.

In front of the tall oval mirror above the sink that dominated the longer wall, dressed in one of the identically plain pairs of underpants that were all his collection comprised of, Malfoy was doing nothing more than dress. There was a faint trace of shower steam still in the air. It was a mundane domestic moment. So why did he have such an irresistible urge to spy?

Malfoy was lathering shaving foam over his jaw. Nothing erotic about that, nothing at all, except that Harry had never seen it before, and pretty much every thought he had about Malfoy seemed to lead back, one way or another, to sex. Watching Malfoy tilt into the razor made him think of how much Malfoy liked it at the end of a lazy weekend when Harry's jaw was coarse with emerging whiskers, how he sighed at the feel of bristle on the tender insides of his thighs and clamped his legs tighter. He thought of that visit to London when, after an agonising work day trying to stop himself re-reading the dangerously explicit letter over and over again, he'd got no further than the lift in Malfoy's hotel before pinning him to the wood panelled wall, Malfoy all fresh laundering and soft skin against Harry's grimy end-of-day roughness, when he'd got Malfoy off while the other hand held down the brake button.

Malfoy raised his chin to get a taut surface on the skin of his throat and slid the blade up it, turning his head to do the sides. It was the same gesture he made under the restraint of the cuffs and the blindfold, seeking out Harry's mouth or sometimes the tips of his fingers. He shaved not with Harry's half-focused impatience, but as if it were part of a ritual he enjoyed. Part of a gentleman's toilette. The foam smelt faintly peppery and expensive. Harry wanted him fiercely. 

As Malfoy washed off the razor, Harry leaned in to see his hands at work, turning the blade this way and that under the water. His wrists spinning the taps looked strong. Why wouldn't they? He made a living on the back of a broomstick, trapping the elusive snitch in his long fingers and holding it fast. As he dried the blade and set it back in its black velvet pouch, Harry thought, as he'd come to think more and more often of late watching Malfoy clutching a mug of beer or fishing a stubborn coin out of his wallet, that Malfoy's hands must perform hundreds of trivial daily tasks that were nothing to do with sex. It roused a bizarre sort of jealousy in him, to think that Malfoy's hands that know their way so surely down the front of Harry's jeans, also lived this other, hidden life. 

From the counter, Malfoy took a brown glass bottle that looked like it belonged in apothecary's, or in another century entirely. He uncorked it and swiped the lotion over his newly shaved skin. The scent went right to Harry's cock. He knew it intimately, from the tender place under Malfoy's jaw where he most liked to feel Harry's mouth, from the collar of his shirts lying mixed up with Harry's on the floor. 

Malfoy ruffled his hair, examining himself as he did it as if trying to recognise what sort of person he was going to be tonight. His hair, almost dry, kept the messy shape. It took a long time, with careful application of the contents of a china jar, for Malfoy to be satisfied, and he worked with such intensity of purpose that Harry crept forward a half-step unnoticed. He plucked with sticky fingers at the ends of his hair until it was shaggy around the edges, bed-tousled. Harry knew the effect of this lightness of touch. Up close, against Harry's nose or cheek or chin, Malfoy's hair was astonishingly soft.

He ruffled it one last time, then cocked his head at his mirror self, and seemed pleased. He reached up to trace the smooth line of his jaw and kept moving until his caress descended over this throat towards his left nipple. He watch his reflection, fingers circling unhurriedly, then bent his head to see it in the flesh without the mirror's intervention. Harry could just make it out in the corner of reflection, the flat, tawny skin starting to rise and swell, and Malfoy's idle arousal fanned Harry's deeper desire.

From on top of the basket by the sink, Malfoy picked up a blue shirt that was so fine Harry was sure he'd be able to imagine the smudge of Malfoy's nipples through it, and have to spend the whole meal looking elsewhere. Malfoy slid it around his shoulders, shrugging it into place. That one unexpected action broke Harry's self-control for good. Malfoy's shoulders flexed like that when he was being fucked and loving it. Kneeling or standing or face-down on the kitchen floor, Malfoy writhed with that same sequence of muscles and groaned Harry's name like a plea.

He had only managed to do up one button, leaving a strip of bare chest that seemed even more erotic than the whole of his naked torso had done, when Harry slipped back into the hall, knocked twice on the nearest wall, and barged back into the bathroom. 

Malfoy met his gaze in the mirror. And he changed. His spine straightened. His eyes got a sharp focus they hadn't had before, and he threw off his idle pace like a cloak. His seemed imminent, primed with possibility. It had happened too quickly to be a knowing facade. And it was Harry's presence that had done this to him, nothing more.

He was starting to smile, his mouth barely opened to say "I didn't hear-" when Harry was on him. 

Good reflexes. The tension of shock washed off him in a moment and he leaned back into Harry's grip, half laughing and half moaning already as Harry mouthed the side of his neck and bit his shoulder. Malfoy's chest was perfectly smooth under his roving hand, the skin softer than ever over the subtle swell of muscle beneath. 

"Funny, I was just thinking about-" The squeeze of Harry's hand through his underpants shut him up for a moment. "-yes, something just like that."

Breathing hard, he was swelling under Harry's strokes. For Harry, he could go from curious to straining in a matter of moments, with the right possessive grip and a bit of dirty talk.

"Good," Harry murmured in his ear as he stripped him with familiar efficiency and wrenched open his own jeans. "Less time to waste on warming you up."

Then he had his fingers in another of Malfoy's jars; then Malfoy was opening up for him, relaxed already from his shower, instinctively pliant and wanting it badly enough to coax his body into submission. 

"Oh hell," Malfoy breathed, eyelids falling low over stunned looking pupils as Harry slicked himself up.

He steadied himself on the sink, bent over it, neck tilted to one side so he could see what Harry was doing in the mirror. Malfoy was partial to a bit of roughness, so Harry didn't take too much care with his finger work. Right now, he was feeling every minute of the two weeks since they'd last done this. He wanted to have Malfoy's bitten-back groan in his ears – the particular one he made when he was at the mercy of Harry's cock and at no other time.

Malfoy didn't disappoint him. He slid in like Malfoy preferred it, slow and deliberate and giving no quarter, and Malfoy's hands flexed about on the flat marble as if it was a complex surface to get a grip on. 

"Fuck-" Malfoy groaned, low in his throat and almost all consonant, and then Harry couldn't wait for him to be ready any more. He drew back and slammed in and Malfoy made an even more provocative sound, eager and unashamed of it.

Harry was even hungrier than he was. He thrust firmly in and out, making the most of the fading resistance he was getting. Malfoy loved this bit: trying to make his muscles let Harry in, and not entirely succeeding yet; desperate to surrender while his body tried to defend itself, and deliciously conflicted between both extremes. Harry fucked him through it. He put one hand on the sink, where Malfoy could see it and understand that Harry wasn't interested in complicating this with any more contact than he needed to get off. 

"Lazy bastard-" Malfoy was fisting his cock, rapidly, even rougher than Harry would have done it. Harry had to bite his shoulder to stop from groaning, and picked up his pace now that he had slick and easy passage. 

And then it all overwhelmed him, hurtling into a climax like turning a tight corner. The scent on Malfoy's neck with the lotion fresh on it, and the smoothness of him all over, and the clean, hot skin of his back. All that, all at once, and Harry crushed Malfoy against him, one arm around his waist, and spent himself in wracking shudders deep in him. 

Harry was still pressed up inside him, hardness only a little diminished, when Malfoy got himself off messily all over the sink, curling right down over it like the force of it had furled him up. Harry touched the back of Malfoy's ribs to feel the stutter of his panting as he gasped himself back under control. 

"Merlin on a stick, Potter. Have they run out of sex in England?" He was smug as he wiped himself clean and ran his hand under the tap. Smug and not trying very hard to hide it, and, Harry thought, furtively pleased. "Actually, I know they haven't. Some of my more interesting fan mail proves it. Sometimes they send pictures – would you care to see?" 

Harry quietly put that aside for something to suggest another time – one of the weekends when Malfoy was in a sour mood from run-ins with team management or being out-shone in the press by a younger player, when it was necessary to come up with something creatively dirty to keep him from dwelling on it.

He watched Malfoy pull his underpants back on, greedy to let no carnal detail escape, then a pair of trousers, arranging himself neatly inside them. 

"We might never make it to dinner," Harry said. 

Malfoy was glancing himself over in the mirror and didn't appear to notice that this had been a suggestion, not an observation. He pulled down the lick of hair that fell over his eyes and produced an instant impression of vulnerability, something of the innocent little boy Harry knew he never had been.

"Punctuality isn't rated very highly here. In any case, the night has barely begun."

He kissed Harry on the mouth, a wifey sort of kiss and purely for the shock value.

"Come on. Let's get some meat in you."

**

Malfoy was right, it was early for dinner so they spent a good two hours on the terrace of a cafe drinking beer, then walked across town to a gallery where Malfoy introduced Harry to the owner and got snappy at whatever reply he made in Spanish, had another drink in the bar on the floor below, during which Harry gathered that Malfoy used part of his exorbitant Quidditch income to sponsor not only this but one or two other small galleries, among other projects that made him even more evasive. Then it finally got late enough to find a restaurant. 

Malfoy chose another one with tables on the street, and they had not got more than a few sips into their glasses of red when a man walking a small dog that looked part Crup stopped to shake Malfoy's hand. After that, it was the two men sitting at the counter inside the window, whose glances and murmurs Harry was pleased to realise he had been misinterpreting. 

Harry pulled the menu over and enjoyed the rare privilege of anonymity. More than lukewarm courtesy, Malfoy greeted his supporters with genuine warmth. Not unacquainted with the sharp end of Malfoy's temper, Harry watched these encounters curiously, waiting for the moment his patience would snap. But this much had not changed since school. When given a task, Malfoy liked to excel at it, and these days a big part of his job was being accessible and charming. 

For a Beater, it usually took phenomenal talent and an off-field scandal to command the attention of the newspapers and the public. Seekers on the other hand were naturally newsworthy: solitary players on whose outstretched fingers the glory of team and city depended. Malfoy was captain too, and foreign, a blond head among the local brunettes, an exotic guest who had naturalised. The Basiliscos had finished last, sixth, eighth, second and third since Malfoy had joined them. He hadn't won them a premiership yet, but he added a touch of glamour without letting it distract him from the job he was paid to do, and he had chosen them. He had chosen them when he had been indistinguishable among the promising juniors, and now that he had the reputation to name his terms, he had stuck around, entrenched himself in their city, unequivocally loyal. 

"He asked who you were," Malfoy said when they were alone again. 

He made a playful little quirk of his mouth as he raised his glass and sipped with his gaze still on Harry. That was what Harry liked about the fans. In their aftermath, Malfoy looked as sleek as a stroked cat, a bit quieter, a bit less brittle. He thought they were a pretty big part of what made Malfoy so much easier to be around these days.

"What did you tell him?"

Malfoy leaned back to let the waiter set down a bowl of olives and both of their meals, and Harry found himself resenting the interruption, eager to hear the answer.

"What do you think?" Malfoy put an olive in his mouth, sucked on it, and spat out the pit, clearly enjoying the moment. "I told him you were a lap-dancer I picked up in a club last night. Exceptional stamina and bendy in all the right places."

"What's the Spanish for bendy?" Harry asked, since he was pretty sure he couldn't trip Malfoy up on the words for lap-dancer or club. 

It wasn't the answer he cared about, only the hesitation that proved he'd had to think of a lie, then the fact that he chose not to answer at all. 

"You should be flattered," Malfoy said instead, stealing a meatball from Harry's plate. "He took one look at you and believed me."

It was only much later, when their plates were empty, that Harry thought it was time to come back to the fan's question. Malfoy was reclining in his chair, head tipped back as if he could see through the glare of city lights to make out the stars. Gone was the impatience, gone was the eye for finding faults. He looked satisfied.

"I have to get going straight after the match tomorrow."

"Hmm?" Malfoy answered. "What for?"

"I'm looking at a house in San Sebastian."

Malfoy said, "Good for you, Harry," and sat up to beckon over another drink. "You have to try the black sherry. I insist. You'll never look back."

And that one was barely empty when he was ordering a firewhisky and talking about a new stadium they were building in Verona. Impossible to be sure, but he did sound like he was keeping the conversation far away from San Sebastian. 

The manner of drinking he'd seen before. Malfoy got playful as he drank, then reckless, then loudly invincible. Harry, who just developed a more and more pronounced tendency to knock things over and laugh, liked watching him slip from one stage to the next. 

On the walk back down La Rambla, as the last couple of shots worked their way into his bloodstream, Malfoy got a bit loose with his hands, slipping one into Harry's pocket when they were stopped at traffic lights. 

"Anything goes here," he murmured, although from what Harry had seen it was the tourists who thought that way, not the locals. "It's nothing like London."

It must have been freedom from his past that he meant. The locals were passionate and highly partisan supporters. As long as Malfoy was their Seeker, nothing he'd done before the first day he pulled on the team colours made any difference in their minds. Although the magical world was small enough that they must have known what his family had done, they preferred to picture him as some sort of fallen princeling seduced in his misspent youth by the wrong cause.

They were walking slowly, jostling each other whenever Malfoy leaned off his balance. 

"Don't you like it here?" Malfoy asked out of nowhere. 

It wasn't clear how specific he was being. They'd turned off the main drag towards the magical district, near the edge of which Malfoy kept his flat. The winding street was dark and quiet, apart from the corner bar up ahead, where light spilled out through the windows and from the lamp above the doorway. It was comfortably full, mostly couples who looked to be local, noisy without tipping over into rowdy.

"Yeah," Harry told him as they moved out of the light into the dimmer lanes beyond, feeling inexplicably shy about it. "Of course I do." 

As he worked his key in the lock, Malfoy gave Harry a sly, side-long glance that reminded him of the first time he'd come here, feeling Malfoy up on the front step because he couldn't make himself wait to get inside. 

"Vodka on ice," Malfoy said exuberantly upon reaching his apartment. He fell back on the sofa and started to pull off his shoes. "Lots of ice. You'll worship my mouth when it's cold."

Bent over, he shot Harry a look through his lashes that was laden with promise. Harry left him struggling with his laces and went for the drinks.

When he returned, Malfoy was out cold, one shoe off and one on. 

Harry sipped a drink and put the other down on a shelf. The irritating thing about being a visitor here was the pressure always to be doing something special. It was like drinking without thirst. But with all the amusements of Barcelona demanding to be tasted, it seemed a waste to ask for a night in, just the company, and the sex he'd crossed the ocean for. 

Extinguishing the overhead light, Harry sat beside Malfoy's slumped form and drank his glass to the bottom, then he pushed off his shoes and tossed his jacket over the back of the couch, and sometime not long after, he must have slept. 

He woke to the pleasure of Malfoy's hand on him. Harry's trousers were open. It was the cool air on the flushed skin between his legs that had woken him. 

Lying on his side with his head on Harry's knee, Malfoy was working him unhurriedly. His light grip barely more than held Harry's cock, shifting and circling around it with the occasional gentle squeeze to see how hard he'd got. The speed of it was maddening and brilliant. The constriction of Malfoy's fingers measured the fullness of his arousal as it grew and heated and stiffened for him. 

Unlike Harry, Malfoy claimed he'd never been able to see the attraction in women. All he liked was cock, and he liked it with a passion that was infectious.

Harry eased his thighs open and sighed. Malfoy was like that. He was at one extreme or the other: trying to overload Harry's senses with everything at once, or focused on one slow task with a clinical obsession for watching the way Harry's arousal built and tortured him and erupted. 

"Yes?" Malfoy murmured, a little bit sweetly and lacking his usual teasing note. "Like that?"

Harry gave him a groan for an answer as he finally tightened his grip, having got the rigidity he wanted, putting on a flurry of speed then dropping back into teasing languor. Harry had a long way to go before he got impatient enough to interfere. He liked the way Malfoy was as free with Harry's cock as he might have been with his own. 

"What half-arsed sort of idea is San Sebastian?" Malfoy said, just a little slurred. He swiped his fingers around the crown, over the slit, letting his fingernail catch gently. He kept his eyes on Harry's cock as he spoke, as if it was what they were talking about. "Either come all the way to the Barrio, or just stay on your bloody side of the channel."

Harry sank right back into the cushions. Malfoy was picking up a rhythm again, building it, and Harry's hips answered it of their own accord, intensifying it, as the tightness of Malfoy's grip responded. 

"Okay."

And then Malfoy leaned up and licked across the top of the head, all without missing a stroke, flattened out his tongue and did it again. He kissed the slit. Once. More delicately than he'd ever kissed Harry's mouth. And the sheer erotic charge of that dragged Harry down into the depths of pleasure. He spilled himself helplessly in Malfoy's hand, thinking of that kiss, coming hard for Malfoy because he wanted it.

He let the contentment and fatigue settle over him like a blanket. When he thought about how he'd return the favour, the possibilities were too complex for him. As it was, it didn't matter because Malfoy put his head down in Harry's wet lap, his soft hair diabolically ticklish, and let out a deep breath that spoke of sleep. 

*

When he woke again, it was still dark and Malfoy was pushing up Harry's shirt to kiss his stomach. He could feel the specific path of Malfoy's tongue drawing slow curves, back and forth, the damp cling of his lips on either side of it. The point of his tongue probed obscenely into Harry's navel, thrusting and plunging and teasing him with the thought of all the other parts of him that might be subject to the same treatment. He'd only been touched in one place, but he felt the effects of it all over.

Then Malfoy's mouth was working its way up, pushing Harry's shirt up to his shoulder, kissing lightly over his ribs until he found a nipple and ran his lips over to make it fill out for him. Propping his elbow for better comfort, Draco wet his tongue in his mouth and stroked it lightly with the tip of his tongue, a touch that worked like soft lashes on the sensitive skin.

When Malfoy paused and drew back, like a master sculptor observing his craftsmanship, the tension of waiting for his next touch was even more potent. He kissed one nipple – a leisurely, dirty grasp of lips – and then his mouth and the tip of his nose brushed across to reach the other and suck it into a matching state of arousal.

Did Malfoy spend the time they were apart thinking of things he could do that Harry had never experienced before? Although Harry found his thoughts turning often to Malfoy, especially over the first two or three days after one of their weekends when a great many everyday gestures seemed to pull on the muscles that had got tender and strained from the athletic sort of sex it took to keep Malfoy satisfied, Harry's thoughts were simple thoughts, in the nature of more and did I? and when next?

Without meaning to, he held his breath to hear the tiny sounds of Malfoy's mouth at work, the slick sound of sucking that made his cock shift, dragging over the unfastened zip of his jeans and filling out all the quicker. 

"God yes. Your mouth – don't stop."

Malfoy moved up to the hollow below his throat, then up onto his windpipe, alternating kisses and lazy bites, closing his mouth over it. He had all the patience in the world now. The slower he went, the harder Harry got for him. 

It was- Harry's thoughts were muddled with sleep and arousal and the dislocation of travel. But in the instants of stillness between fleshy caresses, it seemed obvious to him that what Malfoy was doing was carving out a space that was new for them both. Seeking novelty for himself as well as Harry. Seeking something they could both-

He seized the back of Malfoy's head and shoved their lips together, forcing clumsy, needy kisses between Malfoy's lips. His tongue responded in kind, slippery, keeping up the same intent rhythm he'd bitten into Harry's throat. It was Harry who drew back, mouth and mind saturated, uncertain where to go next. 

"Lie back, Harry," Malfoy whispered, and – oh god – those words. They made Harry's balls clench up as though whatever Malfoy was planning to do was already being done to him. No mere instruction, from Malfoy's mouth those words were a promise, a familiar precursor to yet another breach of Harry's boundaries, yet another wracking climax built on Malfoy's own narcotic blend of impropriety and adventure.

Harry drew his legs up and lay back until his head met the low arm of the generous sofa. Malfoy reached for him instantly, easing his jeans and underwear down to the top of his thighs. The buttons on Malfoy's trousers popped emphatically as they opened. Then Malfoy was raising himself over Harry and letting his weight come down. 

Harry had to make himself breathe. They were – he could feel the shape of Malfoy's legs, through two layers of clothes, and his ribs too. But where their cocks pressed together, they were naked. Harry heard rather than felt his fingers wrenching at the sofa cushion. Malfoy's smooth, well tended cock was squashed into Harry's unruly snarl of hair. The crown of his cock was sensitive enough to feel of the texture of Malfoy's muscles shifting as he settled himself. They were skin to skin, searing heat, hard enough to bruise.

The tight press of their chests, connecting and parting again, only highlighted the fact that Harry was panting uncontrollably.

"Oh god, fuck me," he rasped, and although that wasn't the whole extent of what he wanted, it was as close as he could get. "God, Draco, fuck me-"

"Easy now." A whispery tone that belied the words. 

Malfoy didn't move but just let the heat build between their trapped arousals. Every twitch and pulse of his cock was obvious against Harry's groin, wild and intimate at the same time. Harry broke first, writhing, hips grinding up in search of more.

Only then did Malfoy move off him, shifting onto his side. He sat up to lean over Harry's cock and spit on it. A deliberate dripping pool of it that slid down his shaft, leaving a momentary heat and a cool aftermath, before it dispersed between his balls, as much of a caress as Malfoy's own tongue would have been.

And then Malfoy took hold of him. With an uncompromising grip, he jerked Harry up towards the ceiling. 

"Here's something to think about," Draco said in the low sort of voice he only used for talking dirty. He paused for a few breaths, hand working at a speed that made Harry's toes curl. "I'll fuck you if you like." Did he know how crazy Harry was for hearing words like fuck and cock whispered with Malfoy's drawling vowels and delicate, aristocratic consonants? He rolled his shoulder to shrug off Harry's sudden rough grip. "I'll fuck you if you want it. But it won't be quick."

Harry arched his neck back over the arm of the couch and gritted his teeth against a moan. He'd seen, on the very first night and once or twice since, that drawer of Malfoy's, with all his toys in it. 

Malfoy went on, slower and softer and filthier than ever. "Weekend after next we play Saturday morning. Finished by one. Home by one thirty. Sooner if you don't mind a bit of sweat and mud." He couldn't help it – he put his hand over Malfoy's and urged him to go faster. The grip on his cock was painful now, but he was too far gone for that to slow him down. "That gives us a bit of time to find out what you can take." 

"Yes," Harry breathed, and repeated it, thinking how good it felt to say that word, with Malfoy's damp hand flexing under his and Malfoy's nose nudging gently at his temple. "Yes. Fuck. Malfoy. Yes."

That was the word that unlocked Malfoy's mercy, so he kept on whispering it as he finally got the brisk strokes he needed, and thrust up into Malfoy's hand. His orgasm ran through him like a curse, wiping him out, electrifying him until his nerves were left sizzled and tender, beyond exhaustion.

He lay there drenched in pleasure while, with his hand still wet with what he'd wrung out of Harry, Malfoy perched over his thighs and got himself off messily right in the angle between Harry's legs, filthy and perfect. Harry reached for his hand and laced their fingers together, speechless.

*

A short while later, Malfoy threw a blanket at him – no sheet or pillow followed. "You stay there. I've got to be at the stadium at half eight and the last thing I need is your wandering hands keeping me awake all night."

It was clear from the way he said it that on other nights he would continue to be quite partial to Harry's wandering hands. 

From the bathroom came the quick sounds of Malfoy brushing his teeth, taking a piss, then the bathroom light went off. The heavy blanket over his bare legs made him feel secure and ready for sleep. But he couldn't stop thinking about Malfoy on the other side of his bedroom door 

"Malfoy?" This was crazy. He felt like he was back in a dorm room, telling a joke in the darkness. "Malfoy!"

The reply, when it finally came, sounded sleepily indulgent. "Shut up."

"Malfoy?"

"What?"

That made Harry think. What had he wanted, apart from to make Malfoy reply?

"Set your alarm early, will you?" He heard the snorted response, and imagined the vibration of Malfoy's ribs as he made it. "And don't bother getting dressed."

A few moments later, Malfoy was standing in his doorway, faintly visible as a darker shadow. 

"Potter. If you're the sort of house guest who can't amuse himself without constant attention, then you are not the sort of house guest who's welcome on my sofa."

All of a sudden, Harry's focus returned to him. "Come here."

With an irritated hiss between his teeth, Malfoy sat gingerly on the edge of the couch seat. He had barely settled when Harry sat up and kissed him, to not much in the way of objection. He ran his hand from the side of Malfoy's ribs down over this thigh to make sure he hadn't put any clothes on, and kissed him a few more times

"You're drunk," Malfoy said, although that was more true of himself than Harry. "And sentimental. And if we lose tomorrow because you couldn't keep your hands to yourself for four miserable hours, you might never get lucky again."

Harry smiled against Malfoy's mouth. The kissing wasn't going to turn into anything, but he didn't seem to be able to stop doing it. "Empty threats. Empty. You want me. You want to fuck me."

"Oh and doesn't it get you hot just thinking about it. Look at you, Potter. Look how desperate you are." Their voices were already low, flirty, as if the sex was before them instead of behind. Malfoy dropped to an outright whisper and put his lips against Harry's ear. "I'm going to do it with the windows open so everyone in the street can hear how much you like it."

Harry stifled his groan in the crook of Malfoy's neck. It wasn't that he had a particular fetish for penetration, or for having an audience. It was the dirty thoroughness that Malfoy promised to lavish on the act that made it irresistible: the knowledge that he would spend two weeks turning the idea over in his mind and planning it to filthy perfection. Malfoy had a reckless streak, and an aptitude for creativity, and knew how to push Harry beyond what he had thought his boundaries were.

In the intimacy of the near-total darkness, he was too worn out and elated to care about the consequences of anything he said or did. "You should move in. If I – When I buy a place here. Come and help me choose it, something you'll like." 

Malfoy's teeth closed on his lip, biting hard, beyond the bounds of play. He took a while to reply. "Go to sleep, you idiot." He gently pushed Harry back down on the sofa, but he followed with his mouth still close, their hands entangled. "Don't make me stun you." 

"You're not up to it."

He heard in Malfoy's sigh how tired he really was. "If I took your head off by mistake, it'd be your own stupid, stubborn, Potterish fault."

His voice was getting slow and slurry, like the endorphins from all that sex were finally catching up with him, and Harry's mind suddenly felt the same way. He freed one arm to wrap it around the back of Malfoy's neck and hold him where he'd come to rest, with his cheek over Harry's collarbone and the back of his head tucked under Harry's jaw. 

"Okay," he said, stroking the back of Malfoy's shoulder with the pads of his fingers. Malfoy gave a different kind of sigh and grew heavier in his arms. He was already half asleep. 

Harry let him slip a good deal closer to unconsciousness before he shifted onto his side and pulled Malfoy back against him, easing him out of the twisted position he'd been in. The last thing he wanted was to wear the blame for a cricked neck or a cramp in the morning. Malfoy woke enough to make a few murmurs of annoyance, but not enough to resist. 

Harry kissed his shoulder, closed his teeth gently on the firm muscle of it. He felt weighty in Harry's arms, as he never did when he was awake, always bustling, always with somewhere to go. As soon as he woke, he'd be aloof again, until Harry found an opportunity to bridge the distance between them with alcohol or sex. But for now, Harry could pretend they'd really sorted something out, could imagine that he'd wake up tomorrow finally convinced that what they had between them would last. 

He traced the sharp edge of Malfoy's jaw, like Malfoy himself had done in the mirror before, searching his reflection as if he could see in through his own eyes and detect something. Harry thought he could learn to live with uncertainty. 

*

There were only twenty points in it, but a loss was still a loss. It had been a flukish sort of victory, the Snitch had pretty much swept straight into the open palm of the opposing Seeker. His own failures left Malfoy in an unshakable temper, but when the match was lost by pure bad luck, he seemed to have developed a professional's habit of not taking it personally. If he blamed Harry for the late night, it would only be a teasing reproach. 

No, the loss was not a bad thing, not at all. Tonight, Harry could offer pretty much any questionable thing they'd never done before, acquiesce to one of Malfoy's more unnerving fantasies, and call it an apology.

**

Through the cushioning of the blanket and sheet, the wood floor under Harry's back was just uncomfortable enough to keep him from relaxing. Draco's fingers were barely moving inside him now, no more than the occasional gliding twist to provoke Harry's muscles into another helpless spasm around them. He was relentlessly gentle this afternoon, so that the thought of completion was kept constantly in view but always out of reach.

"Shhh," Draco murmured into his neck. "You're not ready yet. Not ready."

There was no way he could be missing the stuttering of Harry's heartbeat that said he was more than ready, was sinking into a sea of desperation, felt like something in him might break if he didn't get what he so badly needed. His indrawn breath had a revealing hitch in it, and his cock throbbed untouched on his belly. 

"You have to be ready before I fuck you." Draco's fingers flexed and went still. Every time he did that, the shudder seemed to reverberate further up Harry's spine, down both of his legs that parted in the air. 

He had got jittery with the risk of it, half an hour ago, sitting in the cafe down the road as he waited for Draco's match to finish, while his mind thickened with fantasies and the anticipation heated up between his legs. Sometimes when they came together it was with appetites that couldn't be satisfied. It would be Harry, more often, who couldn't muster the patience for play. One week, he couldn't get enough of the way he could make Draco writhe in his bindings, responding to nothing more than the presence or absence of Harry's mouth; the next time, withholding himself seemed an absurd sort of lie that had no place between them. The scathing look he'd got the time he'd sucked Draco deep and hungry to a sixty-second climax, then unshackled him with his mind already on pizza and beer and a slow evening indoors, that look had informed him that he still hadn't grasped the finer courtesies of the world Draco had introduced him to. 

Sometimes when they came together, their appetites matched like paper and flame, like tree and rope, and Harry no longer knew what he could be capable of doing when Draco's mouth was at his ear and reality seemed as far away as a star. 

The memory of Draco's whispered promises had wriggled under his skin as he lifted his empty cup to drain the last pathetic drop of coffee. I'll fuck you if you want it. But it won't be quick. Draco had been drunk when he'd said that, but he'd sounded like he'd meant it, and like he'd thought about it plenty of times before. I'm going to do it with the windows open so everyone in the street can hear how much you want it. 

Now, above his head, Harry's hands were fastened to the foot of the sofa. It was only a thin length of cotton that bound his thumbs together; without the slightest magical effort he could snap it in a moment. It had taken them one awkward night, weeks ago, to establish that being tied up made Harry distressed to a depth that could not be overcome by the slowest ministrations of Draco's mouth, or his most reassuring whispers. He was powerless to stop himself struggling; physical restraints crumbled away into dust and when bound by magic it became clear he would tear himself apart rather than submit. 

Since Harry understood on some murky level that Draco could not keep giving himself up wholeheartedly to the blindfold and cuffs unless he received some measure of surrender in return, they had found this compromise. The slender white thread would remain unbroken, until Draco consented to unfasten it. It was a muffled sort of promise that Harry made every time. 

Draco kissed the tense muscle under his collar-bone. "You want it. You want me inside you." 

That. That sort of filthy observation, in a soft voice that Draco never used with his team, or his fans, or even, judging from Harry's limited perspective, his friends. Spoken directly into Harry's flesh, that undid him every time. Behind it lay even more. Behind it lay the fact that Draco knew how it worked on him, because Draco had watched him through months of ruthless experimentation, had one by one opened all the doors of Harry's most deeply hidden sub-conscious desires, and observed which ones led most surely to pleasure.

He curled his neck, working all the muscles down his front including the ones that Draco's fingers were prising apart, to kiss Draco's sweat-damp hair. Draco's attentiveness was a crooked sort of devotion that Harry could never quite return. He lacked Draco's restraint, tumbled too quickly into the tumult of climax to keep his wits about him. On the nights he drove Draco into ragged, bitter pleading, he did it by instinct, not by strategy. And there was also the tricky matter of those years when Draco had been invisible to him, and, though it was never acknowledged in words, Harry's obliviousness had been less and less reciprocated.

Draco shifted, putting his mouth over Harry's, hot and messy, not a kiss so much as coaxing him open to make one more undefended vulnerability. Harry's breath came in gasps, swallowed instantly by Draco's mouth. He would never have guessed that the act of trust could be so painfully erotic. 

"Shall I fuck you now?" Draco's fingers had come out of him. He was stroking the outside of Harry's ribs, squeezing the bulge of his bicep, tugging gently at the strands of hair under Harry's arm, and Harry didn't think he could stand it anymore. 

But Draco was raising his voice, and the windows, the windows were all open. "Harry? Are you ready for my cock? Tell me."

Harry opened his mouth, unable to answer. 

He had lain there, watching, already bound, with his shirt off and the front of his jeans left cruelly gaping, while Draco had gone around and raised every single sash. Passing voices came up from the lane below, the stutter of a motorbike, the faint smell of coffee and of frypans heating to cook lunch. He had clenched his hands together to keep from snapping his bindings as his arousal pressed into the band of his underwear. The drapes were all drawn open too, inviting in the sluggish, warm air, and the gauzy curtain on the big window above him wafted dangerously so that the wrong sort of gust might reveal him to the apartments opposite. 

The front door lay ajar, with a chair wedged behind it so that only sound could get in and out. Not long ago, with his knees parted on either side of his rib-cage and Draco's tongue probing into him, he'd learned the definition of torture as the red-head from the floor above descended with her two Maltese terriers, each scratchy step of those little paws distinctly audible against the tiles as she paused in the corridor to fuss with their chains. Could she hear the sucking sound as Draco took first one and then the other of Harry's balls into his mouth and let them slip slowly free? Even from a staircase below, she must have heard the way he groaned when Draco's tongue sank back into him. 

Draco took the silence in his stride and went on. "No? Not yet? I have a dozen different things I could put inside you. Should I make you choose?"

"No." God, Draco made him feel naked. Made him strip himself off until he felt like he didn't even have skin and bones to hide behind. "I don't want that. I want you to- to fuck me."

Quickly, Draco bent down. His teeth nibbled at Harry's lower lip, causing an idle flicker of pain. 

"I beg your pardon, Harry?"

His voice was vibrating in Harry's jaw. Of course he had no trouble hearing. 

"Fuck me-" Harry breathed. He steeled himself. "Fuck me!"

It seemed to echo forever off the corners of the ceiling. Once uttered, it lost its aspect of need and seemed more like a command. "Go on." He strained one leg up against his chest to manoeuvre it between them and hook it around Draco's waist. 

Draco's mouth was on his neck then, as he settled down into the space between Harry's legs, pressing their nakedness together under rough scrapes of his teeth and murmurs that belied his previous poise. And then he was fumbling between them, applying one last dollop of slickness even as he lined himself up and gave Harry what he'd demanded. 

"Too much?" Draco asked flatly, as if concerning a lazily applied heating charm or a top-up from a beer jug.

For Harry, it was never the pure exhilaration he expected it to be; from each of the few times he'd done this, he seemed to remember the pleasure and forget how the girth of it strained him. 

"No."

Then Draco was pressing into him, hands splayed over Harry's chest and remaining there until it became obvious that Harry was panting up into Draco's palms. Not from pain, or at least not just that. He could feel it surging under his skin now, the need, the impatience, his body's rebellion against the submission he was forcing upon it. The harder his muscles tried to resist, the more it cost him to keep his legs spread open, to keep his hands clenched together so that the white thread was strained but unbroken. And the more fiercely his arousal gathered and built. 

When Draco bent down and kissed him like that, it was as if a network of new nerves had come into his mouth: he felt every plunge of his tongue, every stroke of his nose over Harry's cheek. And then Draco was moving inside him. If it was too shallow to get Harry off, the lull in arousal liberated him for following the quick, jerky thrusts of Draco's hips, gaining pace as Draco's kisses broke off and he turned his face into Harry's neck. More than anything, he'd got used to the luxury of watching Draco lose it. 

The closest the thread came to snapping was the moment when Draco stiffened against him, hit by shudders that Harry felt bone-deep. It strained him not to free his arms and clutch Draco against him. His own climax, sucked almost instantly out of him by Draco's eager mouth while his long fingers shoved into the sodden, tender mess between his legs, swept over him far too quickly to resist. 

He was still not quite back in his body when Draco's hand skimmed up his chest to unfasten the tie that bound him. Draco rubbed the thin rut that had got imprinted into the base of Harry's thumb. The slight tenderness there was nothing compared to the ache elsewhere, but it was at that moment that Harry had to turn his face away, like he had revealed too much, relinquished something that he couldn't take back.

Draco laughed in the way Harry liked best, breathy and loose. "No need to bother with the windows next time," he observed. "They could have heard you right through the walls."

Harry's throat was dry, as if he might have made more noise than he'd known. 

There were steps ascending outside. Flat heels and two dogs. How much time had passed since she'd left? Harry had no idea. The time he spent with Draco always went too fast, as if the whole of Barcelona operated on different physical principles from what he was used to. 

The wind caught the sheer curtain, letting in the dry air and the memory of the world outside. Draco reached out to catch it, as if he might draw it back to unveil the two of them naked and tangled and sated on the floor. He looked at his shirt that lay on the seat of the armchair. 

"Leave it," Harry said and gripped Draco's wrist to draw it towards him. "What about-" He'd need a drink first, and a shower wouldn't hurt. "You said you had things you wanted to put in me."

His voice didn’t falter, even on those last words. It was Draco who ruffled his hair as if he needed a distraction. His attention came back to where Harry still had not released his wrist. 

"I'll make it good," he murmured, looking at where Harry's fingers met over his veins. "You'll like it."

He didn't sound completely certain. But then, what Harry wanted from Draco was a bit complex at times, and he was a few steps behind Draco in testing his own limits. On both counts, what they did was a work in progress. 

"Shut the windows then."

He watched, as he'd intended, how Draco got to his feet and reached up for the catches, one by one. He liked how it changed the balance of him, elongated his waist and made his buttocks pull up as he stretched, and how his cock bounced invitingly as he came down off the balls of his feet. He liked watching Draco do a simple, everyday task without his clothes on. Possibly that was the sort of fetish Draco would approve of. 

A man could only watch for so long without touching. He waited for the last curtains to be properly shut before he turned Draco around and pressed him up against the window-sill. Pleased and laughing low in his throat, Draco relaxed into the slow sort of kiss Harry had not expected to be able to get away with. He looped his arms lightly around Harry's neck. 

These moments were the most dangerous. He could forget that the man he held in his arms was not a gentle lover but Draco, with all his sharp edges permanently turned outwards. Their kisses left Harry thirsty for more, and Draco let him take everything he wanted, for once, without putting a price on it.

What he had with Draco reminded him of tightrope walking, where the one thing you could not do, no matter what, was stay still. So he would keep on stumbling forward, past hesitation, past discomfort, maybe even beyond the limits of self-preservation, and he would try not to remember that the tightrope had to have an end.


	19. The last slip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry/Draco; knitting - for twisted_miracle

Harry wouldn't be on the raid at all, if Dixon's wife's baby hadn't come a week early. It's been a long time since he was part of the main squad, not since it had become apparent that the feral remnants of the Death Eaters hated him enough to fabricate an entire crime scene for the sole purpose of luring him into the reach of their death curses. To Draco at least, he has seemed finally to accept that he is not expendable, and has even seemed content, if a little restless, in his role as schools liaison. But as it is, the little girl is born with a bad lung, and they are three down with Williamson and Johnson following a lead in Port-au-Prince, and Harry has volunteered to make up the numbers.

Far from a trap, this one should have been a walk in the park. The suspects are illicit potion brewers – enslavement draughts and blood-borne bad luck and the like – not murderers. Except that these brewers are younger and more conceited than most. They flirt with the extremes of magic in a way that is only possible for those who haven't the slightest idea of the worst that it can do.

Circe's Lance is not a killing curse. It is designed to make a statement: a theatrically bloody effect, a maximum of pain, screaming, terror. As Harry obliviously steps on the flagstone that triggers it, he is turning to Ron, with a grin that is equal parts eagerness and danger. 

Silver light, sharp as a needle, and Harry turning towards it. Even as Ron throws himself in the spell's path, forever a half-step too late, it has struck Harry's chest, pierced his uniform in an instant and sent him tumbling backwards. There is no time for fear. Only the astonishment of mortality, and after that, perhaps, one fleeting regret. 

* 

"Are you coming to bed?" The question sounds a little forlorn. Harry lurks in the doorway, hand kneading his bare upper arm.

"I'm busy."

"You're angry."

Harry will never leave this kind of thing alone. He thinks it's a mark of maturity to confront things head on rather than letting them muddle their own way out. It drives Draco crazy, but against all odds they are still together.

"Don't tell me what I am. I'm busy."

Silence on Harry is not assent, it's the very opposite. The hair on the back of his neck prickles as Harry comes up behind the sofa and lays his hands on Draco's shoulders, quietly possessive. Harry's fingers run up into his hair and rub gently, capping the skull, his little fingers stroking the sensitive skin behind his ears. He knows exactly the spot that makes Draco want to moan with pleasure. When he's lavished that with care, he says, 

"Do you want me to tell them I won't go on the raid? Anthony might not get the counter-spell for the back door tomorrow. Maybe Angelina will come back early."

When Draco picks up his work from his lap, Harry takes that as a signal to rub soft circles over his temples, and Draco has to fight the temptation to surrender to the flood of pleasure it brings. 

"I want you to think twice before you volunteer to do stupid, impulsive things," Draco tells him. 

Harry bends down, kisses his neck thoroughly.

"I don't know. Some of the best things in my life came from stupid, impulsive decisions."

Draco turns his head until their lips brush, and there it is, the burning that starts between his legs and then sizzles everywhere his skin is tender, nipples and lips and tongue and wrists and throat. Nerve impulses that don't seem to work for anyone but Harry. That particular look in Harry's eyes means that, when he makes it to bed, it's going to be one of those spectacular nights when neither of them will want to sleep until they've writhed and thrust and sucked and stroked their way through every position two men can twist themselves into. The bankers he's supposed to be meeting with tomorrow won't have much trouble guessing why he looks worn out, but he doesn't care, he might cancel them and spend the day in bed.

"Don't be long," Harry says, with his frank smile that only recently lost its hint of shyness, and peels himself away.

Draco takes a deep breath, and a few more until he's no longer distracted by the smell of Harry's skin, and goes back to his work. They have years left for all of this. 

*

The Death Eaters began to target Harry for a good reason. Only Auror Goldstein keeps his head when Harry's body hits the floor. Ron is howling like a wounded man. The others are shouting. No further thought for procedure, sense or safety, four seasoned Aurors skid to their knees where Ron is cradling Harry's limp head in his lap. Their wands are dropped and their voices gone tight with panic as they yell at each other and jostle to do something – anything – that could unstitch the last ten seconds of history.

It is Goldstein who follows the trail of slightly damp footsteps down the stairs, finds one of the brewers crawling out a basement window to escape their anti-apparition net, and hits him with a summoning charm so heavy that both of his wrists and his cheekbone break when he hits the opposite wall.

*

The soft click of progress is interrupted by Harry's sleepy voice. "Why are you still up? I thought you were coming to bed."

Bare footsteps from behind. Arms sliding over his shoulders. 

"Come on, it's just once, Draco." Harry's hands are the most powerful aphrodisiac Draco has ever known. They're warm from the bed and when they slide down over his chest, it's like they burn away the layer of fabric to touch the raw muscle and make it spasm. "It's not safe if they go in short. You don't want me let them down."

Lips against his ear. More than lips. Harry's tongue teases him, graphically suggestive, searching out tender dips and ridges. "Tell me what I have to do to make it all right. Anything you want. Your craziest fantasy, if you like, I'll do anything." 

"Soon," Draco says, more hungry wheeze than speech. "Just a few more rows. The moonlight's almost gone. Go back to bed. Touch yourself and think about me."

Mouth open over Draco's neck, Harry groans. 

He leans into the bristle on Harry's cheek, kisses it, as Harry tugs open the cord of Draco's pyjama bottoms and thrusts his hand inside. Draco's only human. He puts his work aside so he can reach up to feel the bare skin flexing over Harry's shoulder muscles, and he sinks under the tide of Harry's desire. 

The moon slowly sets.

*

"Kill him," Ron snarls from the spot he hasn't moved from, still bent over his friend's body, clutching the front of Harry's robes. "I'll do it myself."

The brewer is moaning in a crumpled heap of limbs on the floor, saying he's sorry, he's sorry, he didn't mean this. Goldstein wrenches the boy's head up, and doesn't flinch at the gushing blood all over his cheek and jaw, the stripe of gaping flesh. 

"If you don't get this right, I'll hold you down and let him do it. What can we do for Harry?"

The brewer tries to drop his head from Goldstein's cruel grip. His mouth flexes miserably, drool and blood dripping off his bottom lip and catching in the pathetic patch of hair on the point of his chin. He shakes his head helplessly. His eyes well up as if he knows his crime was a capital offence. 

Goldstein takes a tight grip on his slippery wand. 

"No!" Ron draws himself up to his full imposing height. There is nothing in his face but grim certainty. "This is mine. I'm going to do it."

He casts his curse like a swordsman piercing a man's entrails.

*

Some time not long before dawn, the creak of floorboards startles him out of a stealthy sort of nap, and he tries to pick up the stitches where he had left off. 

Dragging the blanket from their bed behind him, Harry settles onto the sofa, covers himself up, and displaces the knitting to lay his head in Draco's lap. "Can't sleep," he says as he makes himself comfortable on Draco's thigh. 

With painful self-discipline, Draco continues to add one stitch after another. He holds back from putting his hands to any more pleasant use. The last of the moonlight is already gone and any moment the floo could announce that Goldstein has worked out the counter-spell. 

"What's that?" Harry asks patiently, a good while after Draco had assumed him to be asleep. 

"Armour," Draco says, a little gruffly. 

As Draco continues the delicate process of casting off, Harry lifts his head to look at the object he has made. There's nothing metallic about it. Luminous white, it looks like spun spiderweb. Why wouldn't it? It's knitted from unicorn mane, blended with even finer white strands from Draco's own head. And magic in the weave of it too. Draco has worked with only one needle. In place of the other, Draco has used his wand.

Draco feels suddenly nervous as he holds the completed work. "Sit up. I'm going to put it on you."

Drowsily, Harry lets himself be manipulated. It's a test of will to resist Harry like this – affectionate and contented and eager to please; all Draco's, with his daytime cares far away. Draco forces himself to concentrate as he runs two longer strands over Harry's shoulders, two under his arms, and fastens them at the back. 

Over Harry's heart sits a knitted diamond, a hand-span in width and slightly glittery even in the low light. 

Harry touches it hesitantly. 

"Doesn't look like armour." 

With no further questions about the powerful magical object wrapped around him, he takes the wand and needle from Draco's hands and puts them on the floor. He leans in for a long, sleepy kiss – the sort of reassurance he doesn't ask for during the day. The sense of relief is more than Draco anticipated. When he gets Harry to the bedroom, he lays him on his back and teases him slowly, mouth and hands trying to communicate what he doesn't have the words to say. They may have years and years for all this, but some nights it doesn't seem like enough time at all. 

*

Harry wakes to a feeling that gravity has deserted him. Completely numb, he could be suspended in a void; there is no ground beneath him and any direction could be up. Far away, a man is screaming. His chest aches. It occurs to him to breathe, and when he does, it's like fire passing over the lining of his lungs. Somewhere nearby, Ron is casting spells. The sound draws him out of the blankness. He remembers the sensation of movement, tries to re-forge the pathway between mind and muscle. His limbs won't obey him. Without action, his whole being could be no more than a dream. A jolt of pure will rolls his head to the side.

"Harry!"

Voices all around him. Hands raising him up. When he manages to prise his eyes open, the world is nothing but a blur. He forces one shaking hand through the hole torn in his uniform. The knitted charm crumbles between his fingers. He pulls it out. 

Draco's beautiful workmanship is shrivelled and black. Burned strands flake off in the air. He puts it against his cheek and tries to hold himself together.

*

From miles away, Draco feels the terrible tug as death tries to sever the bond he has fashioned. His knees buckle beneath him and the ground crashes into him like a train. In his veins, the blood thickens and stops as oxygen and then life are sucked out of it. The pain is extraordinary, every nerve crying out for relief. Then it fades.

He is no Diviner, but history has given him an acute instinct for holding onto what matters. After all the lamentably poor judgments he has made in his young life, he deserves to pick the most important one of all and, finally, get it right. 

When the weakness passes, Draco picks himself up off the floor and forces a glass of water down his throat. The speed of his recovery is a good sign. But the moonlight was gone by the time he worked the last stitches, and some of the darkest spells would have swept through his charm as easily as mist.

Just when despair is getting the better of him, the door handle turns. Harry comes straight to his arms, the last ashy cobwebs of the charm disintegrating in his hand, the door left hanging open. Their mouths join, even if they can't master themselves sufficiently for anything as controlled as a kiss. Draco's scalp stings from the grip in his hair. 

"Promise me," Draco whispers, Harry on his knees, blindly kissing Draco's stomach through his shirt, his hands on Draco's hips trembling. Mumbled words spill from his lips but not the right ones. "Promise me, Harry. Never again."

He strokes Harry's hair ungently, wants to kill him, wants to fuck him until he breaks, wants to crawl inside him until their bones knit together, one flesh, one future. He had thought, until this evening, that he knew the worst fear a man could feel. When he was alone against Voldemort and the world, he never felt as defenceless as he does with Harry.

Harry looks up at him, presses his cheek into Draco's hand.

"Never."

Perhaps they do have years and years of this, after all. 

**


End file.
